Just find it inconceivable that UKIP would be less than three times more popular with voters in 2015 than they were in 2010
They were about five times less popular in 2010 than they were in 2009. I find it hard to believe there wont be some fall back from current polls in 2015.
ps rcs1000 - not sure if you saw my post last night but happy to confirm that bet at those odds
And one of the reasons for the drop between 2009 to 2010 is the different levels of turnout between the 2009 European elections (34%) and the 2010 General Election (65%). As UKIP supporters tend to be older, and older people are more likely always to vote, a low turn out election is likely to flatter UKIP in proportional vote terms compared to a high turnout election.
This effect is just as likely to come into play when comparing low turn out elections (recent locals, and next year's Euros) with the 2015 general election, which is likely to have turn out about double that.
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
A couple of reasons are worth thinking about.
1. We import lots of our food, so we're reliant on the climatic stability of other parts of the world where that food is grown.
2. The extra heat elsewhere will melt ice and expand the oceans, flooding many of our coastal settlements (and the ports through which we import our food and the nuclear power stations we've built around the coast).
1. We can grow more than we do and we're all too fat. The supermarkets might be short of kumquats but we'll get by.
2. There is no forecast rise in sea levels in what's left on my lifetime or my kids lifetime which will have us living in boats. The scaremongering is just ridiculous. If you're worried about sea levels then go to coastal areas of China and tell them to use less energy. There's absolutely no reason why the UK should commit economic suicide when the people potentially most affected can't be bothered to look after themselves.
The bit I have bolded is the crux, I think, of the current problem with this sterile debate.
I haven't said anything about what I think we should do about AGW, either to avert it, or adapt to it. Yet you are equating any action to deal with the problem as "economic suicide".
Whether that is the case or not it makes little difference to whether global warming is happening or not, which is the point to which I was responding. If we could simply agree that this is the case we would be able to have a more fruitful discussion about whether proposed policies to deal with the issue were economically sensible or not (perhaps with a slight diversion into why economic forecasts are even less reliable than climate forecasts, and so cannot be used to make cost/benefit analyses 40 years ahead).
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
"The head of the Police Federation will suggest a "fear factor" in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry is preventing officers from blowing the whistle on how crime statistics are being manipulated.
The intervention by Steve Williams, chairman of the organisation which represents 130,000 frontline officers in England and Wales, is highly significant because it appears to confirm widespread public scepticism of how crime is recorded.
Official figures show crime is at an historic low, despite cuts to police budgets and staffing levels.
"Crimes are downgraded in seriousness or the numbers are hidden. For example, if 10 caravans are broken into overnight with 10 different victims it will sometimes be recorded as just one crime.
"And a stolen mobile phone will be recorded as lost property, and so will not appear in crime data at all.
"If there is a crime where there is little or no evidence, and little chance of police detecting it, then that will be screened out at a very early stage so it does not appear in the stats."
Following on from my post, turnout is of course only part of the story.
So UKIP got 2.5 million votes in 2009 and just shy of 1 million in 2010. Now that a far smaller reduction that the 'five time' drop in vote share (see below) but still represents a lot of people prepared to vote for UKIP in a PR election, that (arguably) many see as being irrelevant, but not not in a general election that counts, and is also FPTP.
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
Sea level rise.
I would like to propose how to mitigate for all this sea-level rise nonsense. We are a modern, advancing society, and the idea that a silly little thing like melting icecaps can effect us is so 1980s. My 12-year old nephew came up with a solution, which I paraphrase here.
Scientists and engineers are currently working on carbon nanotubes, suitable for stretching into space as a space elevator. Just bunch a load of these together, seal them and you have a carbon nanotube straw. Put one end in the ocean, and the vacuum of space will suck the water up. At the space end you will have a large ball of ice that can then be used as a large billiard ball to be fired to deflect any menacing asteroids.
Simples. ;-)
(Yes, I know all the rather large and varied problems with this idea. I just liked it when my nephew asked me whether it was possible).
That's a wonderful story.
Has your nephew ever been shown a siphon in action?
Thanks. :-)
His dad is a farm mechanic and an uncle works for JCB, so he knows an awful lot about mechanics and electrics. And he will have seen petrol / diesel having been siphoned a few times.
The AGW debate is driven by emotion not cold hard cost/benefit analysis. CO2 levels continue to rise. Average global temperatures levelled off more than 10 years ago. Nobody understands why. Nobody has a good climate model that can even predict the past let alone the future.
The UK is not geting warmer, quite the opposite. If elsewhere gets hotter we can't stop it - we can only make a marginal contribution to whatever overall direction the climate will take.
For us the sensible policy is not to try to stop anything but to mitigate likely effects. If the sea is going to rise we will need better sea defences. I live in the Netherlands where half the country is below sea-level, literally. The runway at Schiphol is several metres below. BFD. It is manageable and at much lower economic cost than trying to stop industry. If greenies are worried we'll get wet then spend some money investing in sea and flood defences - but do NOT seek to ruin our economy on the altar of Gaia.
Let scientists explain what is happening - in a scientific fashion (conjectures, tests, openly shared and contested models, revisions, debate and a slow journey towards accepted models. etc)
Let politicians decide what is the correct repsonse based upon marginal cost / benefit. If voters elect those who say sea walls is more sensible than windmills then the scientists and greenies should butt out.
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
Right. It's fallen from extremely high levels to very high levels. As I said.
Lowest murder rates since the late 60's.And as I've demonstrated to you before almost as low as Edwardian England (perhaps lower if infanticides had been measured then)
Last nights little rant about the liberal establishment releasing someone to kill summed it up, you hadn't realised he was released by a right wing German govt, but it didn't stop the knee jerk propaganda
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
Fraser Nelson @frasernelson The IMF are not the only ones to worry about Osborne's messing with the housing market. Speccie cover: http://ow.ly/i/2aV4J
Amongst all of Osborne's damaging policies and strategies (most of which have damaged the Tory party admittedly) this one could be the biggest and longest lived.
Considering that the zombie debt surrounding inflated house prices is because Labour allowed the housing market to run out of control (while taking the popularity that came with rising prices), *and* failing to regulate the lending sector properly, it's extraordinary brass neck to criticise Osborne for attempting to prevent the fallout from the biggest housing bubble in history from acting as too big a break on the economy.
You want state subsidised house price inflation that's your choice.
The BoE has a target inflation rate a little above zero for a reason. Sky-high house prices are a problem but then so are declining house prices. Considering the bigger picture, encouraging annual rises of around 2% would be no bad thing.
Besides, I've just bought a house at the bottom of the cycle, so am covered either way.
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
A couple of reasons are worth thinking about.
1. We import lots of our food, so we're reliant on the climatic stability of other parts of the world where that food is grown.
2. The extra heat elsewhere will melt ice and expand the oceans, flooding many of our coastal settlements (and the ports through which we import our food and the nuclear power stations we've built around the coast).
1. We can grow more than we do and we're all too fat. The supermarkets might be short of kumquats but we'll get by.
2. There is no forecast rise in sea levels in what's left on my lifetime or my kids lifetime which will have us living in boats. The scaremongering is just ridiculous. If you're worried about sea levels then go to coastal areas of China and tell them to use less energy. There's absolutely no reason why the UK should commit economic suicide when the people potentially most affected can't be bothered to look after themselves.
The bit I have bolded is the crux, I think, of the current problem with this sterile debate.
I haven't said anything about what I think we should do about AGW, either to avert it, or adapt to it. Yet you are equating any action to deal with the problem as "economic suicide".
Whether that is the case or not it makes little difference to whether global warming is happening or not, which is the point to which I was responding. If we could simply agree that this is the case we would be able to have a more fruitful discussion about whether proposed policies to deal with the issue were economically sensible or not (perhaps with a slight diversion into why economic forecasts are even less reliable than climate forecasts, and so cannot be used to make cost/benefit analyses 40 years ahead).
I'm simply observing the real impacts of what HMG has been doing for the last two decades in penalising energy use and using climate change as cover to introduce additional energy taxes. The net effect of this has been to price energy intensive businesses out of the UK and into the very countries which are most at risk and which in many cases have more lax environmental standards.
As for what is happening yes the earth as a whole has got warmer. I happen to think it has more to do with weather others think it is human activity. There's no conclusive evidence either way.
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
Right. It's fallen from extremely high levels to very high levels. As I said.
Lowest murder rates since the late 60's.And as I've demonstrated to you before almost as low as Edwardian England (perhaps lower if infanticides had been measured then)
Last nights little rant about the liberal establishment releasing someone to kill summed it up, you hadn't realised he was released by a right wing German govt, but it didn't stop the knee jerk propaganda
"Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate"
A US research project based on medical advances in treating gunshot wounds. What percentage of murders and attempted murders involve guns in the UK compared to the USA?
Clue, it's a lot lower. But you didn't know it was a US research study did you.
As it says on the abstract
"Although the study is based on US data, the researchers say the principle applies to other countries too: “There is reason to expect a similar trend overall in Britain,” said Dr Anthony Harris, the lead author of the study."
Following on from my post, turnout is of course only part of the story.
So UKIP got 2.5 million votes in 2009 and just shy of 1 million in 2010. Now that a far smaller reduction that the 'five time' drop in vote share (see below) but still represents a lot of people prepared to vote for UKIP in a PR election, that (arguably) many see as being irrelevant, but not not in a general election that counts, and is also FPTP.
A small (but not insignificant) part of the difference will also be due to the difference between a full slate in the euros and not standing everywhere in the GE. This factor will probably not be there in 2015 (or if it is it will be greatly reduced).
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
If the police recorded stats are being fiddled and the BCS isn't diverging then it means the BCS must be being fiddled as well.
Oh no the conspiracy theorist are back.
Or, of course, and more plausibly, if both measures, which are compiled completely independently of each other and look at crime from different end of the telescope (have you been a victim, vs did you report it to the police) are showing the same trend then perhaps, just perhaps that trend is correct.
Following on from my post, turnout is of course only part of the story.
So UKIP got 2.5 million votes in 2009 and just shy of 1 million in 2010. Now that a far smaller reduction that the 'five time' drop in vote share (see below) but still represents a lot of people prepared to vote for UKIP in a PR election, that (arguably) many see as being irrelevant, but not not in a general election that counts, and is also FPTP.
A small (but not insignificant) part of the difference will also be due to the difference between a full slate in the euros and not standing everywhere in the GE. This factor will probably not be there in 2015 (or if it is it will be greatly reduced).
That's true. Although presumably in FPTP elections UKIP have focussed their candidates on the seats where they think they will do best. So there is an issue of diminishing return here. If you stand in 50% of the seats, presumably those are your strongest 50% so you wouldn't expect to double your vote share (or indeed anything like it) were you to put up candidates in all seats.
What is not going to work for too much longer is the NOTA approach from UKIP. The reality is that especially with gay marriage, Europe, etc – agree or disagree – politicians have to make decisions and that much as it would be nice to have things happen as each of us would wish, the reality is we need people to act, in a credible way, for the best interests of the country as they see them.
It may be the UKIP develops a coherent manifesto addressing the boring but necessary elements of government but I doubt it. And if they did there would still be the credibility issue. So that leaves them as a rump, single issue protest party cf The Greens and outside the political mainstream.
The more people say it’s the Elite vs the Little People, Us vs Them, as though there is a parallel political system they can somehow magic up, the more it actually sounds ridiculous and I think that that realisation will grow.
International experience suggests that semi-joke screw-the-establishment parties (Grillo is the obvious recent example) can do well in one election, so I'm not sure you're right that UKIP (which has rather more substance than Grillo) will flal over before 2015. They tend to come apart when they get anywhere near power.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
Though it did stop them from enjoying unrationed food and fuel, for example.
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
If the police recorded stats are being fiddled and the BCS isn't diverging then it means the BCS must be being fiddled as well.
Oh no the conspiracy theorist are back.
Or, of course, and more plausibly, if both measures, which are compiled completely independently of each other and look at crime from different end of the telescope (have you been a victim, vs did you report it to the police) are showing the same trend then perhaps, just perhaps that trend is correct.
You're missing the point. I was saying *if* the police federation come out en masse saying the police crime stats have been fiddled downwards for years - and even more by simply ignoring high crime areas than actual fiddling - then logically either the BCS would have diverged or it would have to be being fiddled as well.
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
Right. It's fallen from extremely high levels to very high levels. As I said.
Lowest murder rates since the late 60's.And as I've demonstrated to you before almost as low as Edwardian England (perhaps lower if infanticides had been measured then)
Last nights little rant about the liberal establishment releasing someone to kill summed it up, you hadn't realised he was released by a right wing German govt, but it didn't stop the knee jerk propaganda
"Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate"
A US research project based on medical advances in treating gunshot wounds. What percentage of murders and attempted murders involve guns in the UK compared to the USA?
Clue, it's a lot lower. But you didn't know it was a US research study did you.
As it says on the abstract
"Although the study is based on US data, the researchers say the principle applies to other countries too: “There is reason to expect a similar trend overall in Britain,” said Dr Anthony Harris, the lead author of the study."
The period of greatest change came between 1972 and 1977, on the heels of the US involvement in the Vietnam war, which triggered big advances in trauma care.
Fatal shootings in the USA are over 10,000 per year. In the UK it's 40-50
You think you can extrapolate from medical advances in treating gunshot wounds on the US fatality rate to the UK fatality rate and still expect people to believe your conspiracy theories?
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
If the rest of the world wants us to adjust our policies to suit them, they could always pay us.
That said: if rising temperatures were to result in rising sea levels, then I suspect we'd suffer the twin perils of floods and freezing weather.
The latest assessment released earlier this month has a range of 3-36 cm sea rise over the next 100 years, and that the doomsday scenarios are highly unlikely. The bad news for us folks in the Midlands is that London won't be flooded out after all, we were hoping to sell our much underpriced houses to bankers. ;-)
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
They paid the debt off gradually over decades through economic growth.
As well as an assumption that we understand climate well enough to model it accurately, predicting the climate 100 years ahead requires you to know the world's population in 100 years' time; the average price of energy over the next 100 years; and the most significant technology developments over the next 100 years.
Nobody has ever succeeded in predicting any of the above, hence the entire exercise is fundamentally pointless, and in fact decadent.
In fact, to believe in CAGW you pretty much have to believe in God, for the reasons set out here:
Then you'll be expecting the British Crime survey to start diverging from crime figures soon then?
If that argument is correct then it must do. But we know that crime has fallen on all measures over the last fifteen years.
(as immigration has risen)
Right. It's fallen from extremely high levels to very high levels. As I said.
Lowest murder rates since the late 60's.And as I've demonstrated to you before almost as low as Edwardian England (perhaps lower if infanticides had been measured then)
Last nights little rant about the liberal establishment releasing someone to kill summed it up, you hadn't realised he was released by a right wing German govt, but it didn't stop the knee jerk propaganda
"Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate"
A US research project based on medical advances in treating gunshot wounds. What percentage of murders and attempted murders involve guns in the UK compared to the USA?
Clue, it's a lot lower. But you didn't know it was a US research study did you.
As it says on the abstract
"Although the study is based on US data, the researchers say the principle applies to other countries too: “There is reason to expect a similar trend overall in Britain,” said Dr Anthony Harris, the lead author of the study."
The period of greatest change came between 1972 and 1977, on the heels of the US involvement in the Vietnam war, which triggered big advances in trauma care.
Fatal shootings in the USA are over 10,000 per year. In the UK it's 40-50
You think you can extrapolate from medical advances in treating gunshot wounds on the US fatality rate to the UK fatality rate and still expect people to believe your conspiracy theories?
Not me, Dr Harris.
You haven't read the report so you don't have a clue.
Gunshot killings fell from a peak in the US of 18,000 in 1993 to a low of 11,000 last year. Right, so lets pretend for a moment that all of those were down to advances in medical science (unlikely but lets assume) - a third of killings averted.
Right so given the relative number of gun crimes in the UK, lets knock the same proportion off, about 30 per year averted.
Murder is still lower than it was forty years ago,whatever Stormfront tells you.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
They paid the debt off gradually over decades through economic growth.
And that's where we are now. And borrowing isn't growth it's debt.
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
A couple of reasons are worth thinking about.
1. We import lots of our food, so we're reliant on the climatic stability of other parts of the world where that food is grown.
2. The extra heat elsewhere will melt ice and expand the oceans, flooding many of our coastal settlements (and the ports through which we import our food and the nuclear power stations we've built around the coast).
1. We can grow more than we do and we're all too fat. The supermarkets might be short of kumquats but we'll get by.
2. There is no forecast rise in sea levels in what's left on my lifetime or my kids lifetime which will have us living in boats. The scaremongering is just ridiculous. If you're worried about sea levels then go to coastal areas of China and tell them to use less energy. There's absolutely no reason why the UK should commit economic suicide when the people potentially most affected can't be bothered to look after themselves.
The bit I have bolded is the crux, I think, of the current problem with this sterile debate.
I haven't said anything about what I think we should do about AGW, either to avert it, or adapt to it. Yet you are equating any action to deal with the problem as "economic suicide".
Whether that is the case or not it makes little difference to whether global warming is happening or not, which is the point to which I was responding. If we could simply agree that this is the case we would be able to have a more fruitful discussion about whether proposed policies to deal with the issue were economically sensible or not (perhaps with a slight diversion into why economic forecasts are even less reliable than climate forecasts, and so cannot be used to make cost/benefit analyses 40 years ahead).
I'm simply observing the real impacts of what HMG has been doing for the last two decades in penalising energy use and using climate change as cover to introduce additional energy taxes. The net effect of this has been to price energy intensive businesses out of the UK and into the very countries which are most at risk and which in many cases have more lax environmental standards.
As for what is happening yes the earth as a whole has got warmer. I happen to think it has more to do with weather others think it is human activity. There's no conclusive evidence either way.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the UK have risen because we have been buying cheap coal to burn in our power stations, since the US has cheap coal to sell following their shale gas boom.
If HMG were really doing anything effective to control carbon dioxide emissions that would not have happened. Energy prices have gone up because oil and gas prices have gone up, because China's economic growth has increased demand.
You disagree with the experts if you wish, who despite claims to the contrary are open about the uncertainties in their judgements - they give a 90% probability that recent warming is due to humans.
It's impossible to have a debate when the facts are disputed.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
They paid the debt off gradually over decades through economic growth.
And that's where we are now. And borrowing isn't growth it's debt.
The level of debt per se is irrelevant, what is important is debt per GDP - that is how you determine whether debt is managable or not. And of course if you have no growth, or worse if your economy contracts the debt problem gets worse even if you don't borrow a penny more. And the reverse is also true - if you grow your debt becomes easier even if you don't pay a penny back.
The other factor that is of course relevant is the cost of the debt - interest payments as it were. And these are also historically low (and before people start saying this is somehow to do with Osborne, they were lower still relative to overall debt under Darling). So currently we are spending less than 3% of our GDP servicing that debt - that is less than any year you might want to pick from 1917 to 1999.
Indeed in the 30s we were spending over 9% of GDP on debt interest, and even in the early 80s this was more than 5%.
As well as an assumption that we understand climate well enough to model it accurately, predicting the climate 100 years ahead requires you to know the world's population in 100 years' time; the average price of energy over the next 100 years; and the most significant technology developments over the next 100 years.
Nobody has ever succeeded in predicting any of the above, hence the entire exercise is fundamentally pointless, and in fact decadent.
In fact, to believe in CAGW you pretty much have to believe in God, for the reasons set out here:
Climate Scientists don't try to predict any of the economic stuff, they run the models several times with different scenarios so that people can see what the effect of their choices will be - ie this will happen if we reduce emissions gradually, this will happen if we keep on burning fossil fuels without a care in the world, etc.
This is about choices, and about maturely understanding the consequences of those choices. I'd have thought this was natural conservative territory. You'd have thought that it would be the deranged loonies who think they can print money and never pay back debts without any ill effect who would be in favour of letting tomorrow worry about itself. It's a bizarre role-reversal.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
Sea level rise.
I would like to propose how to mitigate for all this sea-level rise nonsense. We are a modern, advancing society, and the idea that a silly little thing like melting icecaps can effect us is so 1980s. My 12-year old nephew came up with a solution, which I paraphrase here.
Scientists and engineers are currently working on carbon nanotubes, suitable for stretching into space as a space elevator. Just bunch a load of these together, seal them and you have a carbon nanotube straw. Put one end in the ocean, and the vacuum of space will suck the water up. At the space end you will have a large ball of ice that can then be used as a large billiard ball to be fired to deflect any menacing asteroids.
Simples. ;-)
(Yes, I know all the rather large and varied problems with this idea. I just liked it when my nephew asked me whether it was possible).
That's a wonderful story.
Has your nephew ever been shown a siphon in action?
Thanks. :-)
His dad is a farm mechanic and an uncle works for JCB, so he knows an awful lot about mechanics and electrics. And he will have seen petrol / diesel having been siphoned a few times.
What a wonderful and original idea from a young person. I love this sort of thing.
In case anyone's interested, although it sounds great and uses the vacuum of space as the energy driver to suck up the water (a very clever idea from a 12 year old) unfortunately it won't work! When the height of a column of water reaches about 32 feet it collapses under its own weight (sort of) this is dependant on the air pressure around it. Therefore a column of water without an additional energy source would not be higher than 32 feet. It is possible to create a barometer using this effect with a sealed tube of liquid. Normally mercury is used as the column required is much shorter.
So what ? Since we appear to be in that bit of the world which isn't prone to extremes of temperature, why are we making pointless efforts to contol someone else's climate ?
A couple of reasons are worth thinking about.
1. We import lots of our food, so we're reliant on the climatic stability of other parts of the world where that food is grown.
2. The extra heat elsewhere will melt ice and expand the oceans, flooding many of our coastal settlements (and the ports through which we import our food and the nuclear power stations we've built around the coast).
1. We can grow more than we do and we're all too fat. The supermarkets might be short of kumquats but we'll get by.
2. There is no forecast rise in sea levels in what's left on my lifetime or my kids lifetime which will have us living in boats. The scaremongering is just ridiculous. If you're worried about sea levels then go to coastal areas of China and tell them to use less energy. There's absolutely no reason why the UK should commit economic suicide when the people potentially most affected can't be bothered to look after themselves.
The bit I have bolded is the crux, I think, of the current problem with this sterile debate.
I haven't said anything about what I think we should do about AGW, either to avert it, or adapt to it. Yet you are equating any action to deal with the problem as "economic suicide".
Whether that is the case or not it makes little difference to whether global warming is happening or not, which is the point to which I was responding. If we could simply agree that this is the case we would be able to have a more fruitful discussion about whether proposed policies to deal with the issue were economically sensible or not (perhaps with a slight diversion into why economic forecasts are even less reliable than climate forecasts, and so cannot be used to make cost/benefit analyses 40 years ahead).
I'm simply observing the real impacts of what HMG has been doing for the last two decades in penalising energy use and using climate change as cover to introduce additional energy taxes. The net effect of this has been to price energy intensive businesses out of the UK and into the very countries which are most at risk and which in many cases have more lax environmental standards.
As for what is happening yes the earth as a whole has got warmer. I happen to think it has more to do with weather others think it is human activity. There's no conclusive evidence either way.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the UK have risen because we have been buying cheap coal to burn in our power stations, since the US has cheap coal to sell following their shale gas boom.
If HMG were really doing anything effective to control carbon dioxide emissions that would not have happened. Energy prices have gone up because oil and gas prices have gone up, because China's economic growth has increased demand.
You disagree with the experts if you wish, who despite claims to the contrary are open about the uncertainties in their judgements - they give a 90% probability that recent warming is due to humans.
It's impossible to have a debate when the facts are disputed.
You seem to think CO2 stays in the country where it was released it doesn't. The problem of CO2 ( if that's what it is) is centred not so much on the UK but in developing countries. Those pushing hard for development like China and India and those where slash and burn agriculture is the norm. Closing 5 coal power stations in the UK will change nothing, bar the UK's energy security.
And while oil and gas have gone up due to demand, in the UK they would have gone up much less if "green" taxes hadn't been pushed up to ridiculous levels. HMG is still the largest cost component in a litre of petrol. If we want to stop CO2 rising then we should plant some trees instead of subsidising German wind turbine manufacturers.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
bad day at the office Prof ? You're still talking bollox.
Another way of looking at the UKIP seat vote equation is this:-
The record vote increase in a GE for any party in a single seat (ignoring by-election boosts) is around 25% or less (e.g. Redcar, 2010, Crosby 1997).
Conversely, very few seats have been won with less than 33% of the vote in the past 100 years.
Ignoring the special case of Buckingham, UKIP's best performances in 2010 were in the 8%-9% range.
Do the math. UKIP have to get very, very lucky indeed to win a seat from where they start in 2010...
Eastleigh, with its by-election boost, may be their best shot, although there again there are only a handful of instances of a (losing) party doing better in the subsequent GE than it did in a BE.
He claims Pirelli aren't doing a good job after a 4 stop strategy won the Spanish Grand Prix. For clarification, that's entirely different to 2011 when Vettel won the Spanish Grand Prix with a 4 stop strategy.
If the rumours are to be believed, it looks as if 2 Somalians have murdered a serving soldier, and then waited 20 minutes for a police armed response unit to arrive. Seriously bad news.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
They paid the debt off gradually over decades through economic growth.
And that's where we are now. And borrowing isn't growth it's debt.
The level of debt per se is irrelevant, what is important is debt per GDP - that is how you determine whether debt is managable or not. And of course if you have no growth, or worse if your economy contracts the debt problem gets worse even if you don't borrow a penny more. And the reverse is also true - if you grow your debt becomes easier even if you don't pay a penny back.
The other factor that is of course relevant is the cost of the debt - interest payments as it were. And these are also historically low (and before people start saying this is somehow to do with Osborne, they were lower still relative to overall debt under Darling). So currently we are spending less than 3% of our GDP servicing that debt - that is less than any year you might want to pick from 1917 to 1999.
Indeed in the 30s we were spending over 9% of GDP on debt interest, and even in the early 80s this was more than 5%.
All well and good, but when you inherit a deficit of 11% of GDP, it is rather important to start reducing it. When a government has run up huge debts due to fighting a war, and the war ends, then one can reduce the deficit fairly painlessly, by cutting military expenditure. Harder choices have to be made where those easy savings aren't available.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
bad day at the office Prof ? You're still talking bollox.
Oh - can't deal with real numbers, so trot out insults.
These are official ONS data on borrowing and cost of borrowing;
Also interesting to look at the better record of running an annual surplus rather than deficit.
In the 66 years since 1945-46 (up to 2012) there have been only been 11 years which recorded a surplus, of these 7 were during Labour administrations, and 4 under the tories (of which 3 were simply continuations of the surpluses from a previous labour administration, e.g. 1951-52 continuing 1948-51, and 1970-71 continuing 69-70 - interestingly in both cases the surplus under the tories was markedly lower than under the labour administration). None of the Labour surpluses were continuation of tory surpluses.
And you need to factor in that the tories have been in power for more years since 1945 than labour - so labour achieved surpluses in 7 out of 29 years (24%), the tories just 4 in 37 (11%).
Oh, I guess your response to real data will simply be insults.
If the rumours are to be believed, it looks as if 2 Somalians have murdered a serving soldier, and then waited 20 minutes for a police armed response unit to arrive. Seriously bad news.
Hopefully the WPC's good work has some permanent effects on these scumbags.
If the rumours are to be believed, it looks as if 2 Somalians have murdered a serving soldier, and then waited 20 minutes for a police armed response unit to arrive. Seriously bad news.
If the rumours are to be believed, it looks as if 2 Somalians have murdered a serving soldier, and then waited 20 minutes for a police armed response unit to arrive. Seriously bad news.
They may not have been specifically waiting for *armed* response. They may have been hoping for unarmed response first - but yes armed response eventually.
If the rumours are to be believed, it looks as if 2 Somalians have murdered a serving soldier, and then waited 20 minutes for a police armed response unit to arrive. Seriously bad news.
Hopefully the WPC's good work has some permanent effects on these scumbags.
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity. "quoted"
An Irish bloke has today been charged with the murder of four soldiers in London. Were you around in 1982 dribbling and drooling about Irish immigrants then?
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity. "quoted"
An Irish bloke has today been charged with the murder of four soldiers in London. Were you around in 1982 dribbling and drooling about Irish immigrants then?
You are quite sick! Have a long look in the mirror.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
bad day at the office Prof ? You're still talking bollox.
Oh - can't deal with real numbers, so trot out insults.
These are official ONS data on borrowing and cost of borrowing;
Also interesting to look at the better record of running an annual surplus rather than deficit.
In the 66 years since 1945-46 (up to 2012) there have been only been 11 years which recorded a surplus, of these 7 were during Labour administrations, and 4 under the tories (of which 3 were simply continuations of the surpluses from a previous labour administration, e.g. 1951-52 continuing 1948-51, and 1970-71 continuing 69-70 - interestingly in both cases the surplus under the tories was markedly lower than under the labour administration). None of the Labour surpluses were continuation of tory surpluses.
And you need to factor in that the tories have been in power for more years since 1945 than labour - so labour achieved surpluses in 7 out of 29 years (24%), the tories just 4 in 37 (11%).
Oh, I guess your response to real data will simply be insults.
No Prof, I just like laughing at your selective version of reality.
Start with the government has moved several key chunks of spending off balance sheet on to PFI so the reported numbers don't stack up, then add in the unsustainable levels of consumer debt which fuelled government tax receipts and then ask if it was wise for a government to chose to base its tax policies on boom sectors such as housing sales instead of taxing Starbucks or Google and it doesn't take long to see that the tax base was a bit of a mirage. It has been the collpase of the tax base which has been the biggest hit in this recession and why we're simply seeing taxes go up to closer to what we spend. The UK is no different than those other "model" economies in Ireland and Spain which flattered themselves through asset inflation and cheap borrowing.
And so we find ourselves in the wonderland scenario where Osborne is still borrowing more than he takes in, has little to show for it, but somehow you insist borrowing another couple of billion will change it all.
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity. "quoted"
An Irish bloke has today been charged with the murder of four soldiers in London. Were you around in 1982 dribbling and drooling about Irish immigrants then?
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
A Turkish woman falling in love with and marrying a British (I assume) man and integrating cannot be compared with Somalian gang culture in S London ending up with a soldier being beheaded in broad daylight.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
bad day at the office Prof ? You're still talking bollox.
Oh - can't deal with real numbers, so trot out insults.
These are official ONS data on borrowing and cost of borrowing;
Also interesting to look at the better record of running an annual surplus rather than deficit.
In the 66 years since 1945-46 (up to 2012) there have been only been 11 years which recorded a surplus, of these 7 were during Labour administrations, and 4 under the tories (of which 3 were simply continuations of the surpluses from a previous labour administration, e.g. 1951-52 continuing 1948-51, and 1970-71 continuing 69-70 - interestingly in both cases the surplus under the tories was markedly lower than under the labour administration). None of the Labour surpluses were continuation of tory surpluses.
And you need to factor in that the tories have been in power for more years since 1945 than labour - so labour achieved surpluses in 7 out of 29 years (24%), the tories just 4 in 37 (11%).
Oh, I guess your response to real data will simply be insults.
No Prof, I just like laughing at your selective version of reality.
Oh so using official ONS data, accepted by Osborne et al, the Labour team plus external organisations such as IMF etc is somehow being selective. Nope these are the facts - maybe you don't like them, but that ain't going to change 'em.
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
I think in essence we see here what is so dismally predictable about your average Tory voter - the inability to see beyond themselves.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
You seem to forget they paid their debts off. It's how they prospered.
Over a very, very long period, 20 to 30 years. Remember even in the early 60s debt levels per GDP were higher than they are currently, and they only really stabilised after the huge increase driven by the war, in the mid 1970s.
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
Well as ever the problem for Labourites is no-one believes you'll pay your debts down. Juggling the cah flow's fine for the nation, but with Labour debt only goes one way. It sort of raises the question why didn't you tax all those rich corporations and bankers to pay for excess spending instead of borrowing it all ?
And do remind me how the average levels of borrowing across the Blair/Brown years (even including the crash) compared with that of the previous Major/Thatcher Tory administration.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
bad day at the office Prof ? You're still talking bollox.
Oh - can't deal with real numbers, so trot out insults.
These are official ONS data on borrowing and cost of borrowing;
Also interesting to look at the better record of running an annual surplus rather than deficit.
In the 66 years since 1945-46 (up to 2012) there have been only been 11 years which recorded a surplus, of these 7 were during Labour administrations, and 4 under the tories (of which 3 were simply continuations of the surpluses from a previous labour administration, e.g. 1951-52 continuing 1948-51, and 1970-71 continuing 69-70 - interestingly in both cases the surplus under the tories was markedly lower than under the labour administration). None of the Labour surpluses were continuation of tory surpluses.
And you need to factor in that the tories have been in power for more years since 1945 than labour - so labour achieved surpluses in 7 out of 29 years (24%), the tories just 4 in 37 (11%).
Oh, I guess your response to real data will simply be insults.
No Prof, I just like laughing at your selective version of reality.
Oh so using official ONS data, accepted by Osborne et al, the Labour team plus external organisations such as IMF etc is somehow being selective. Nope these are the facts - maybe you don't like them, but that ain't going to change 'em.
Of course it is selective, because in quoting the data you don't want to accept the off balance sheet liabiliities, nor do you wish to consider the ill-advised nature of a government spending splurge financed by a consumer boom. You do realise when Brown said he had abolished boom and bust he wasn't serious ?
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
A Turkish woman falling in love with and marrying a British (I assume) man and integrating cannot be compared with Somalian gang culture in S London ending up with a soldier being beheaded in broad daylight.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
Sounds more like violent Islamist terrorists rather than "Somalian gang culture" why have you claimed gang culture?
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
A Turkish woman falling in love with and marrying a British (I assume) man and integrating cannot be compared with Somalian gang culture in S London ending up with a soldier being beheaded in broad daylight.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
Sounds more like violent Islamist terrorists rather than "Somalian gang culture" why have you claimed gang culture?
Because there is a history of Somalian gang culture in that part of London
But youre right it sounds more like violent Islamic terrorism by Somalians
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
A Turkish woman falling in love with and marrying a British (I assume) man and integrating cannot be compared with Somalian gang culture in S London ending up with a soldier being beheaded in broad daylight.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
Sounds more like violent Islamist terrorists rather than "Somalian gang culture" why have you claimed gang culture?
Purely guessing from the circumstantial i wouldn't be surprised if they were both i.e. had previous for non-jihadist criminal activity.
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
My dear JosiasJessop. This is not about racism at all. It is about Multiculturlism, where different communities eye each other with deepening suspicions; where white girls can be farmed out by Muslims, and where a soldier can be beheaded in central london by two muslims shout Alah Ahbar! and photographing their grisly attack for propaganda purposes.
So sorry, but these things need saying: a whole section of our population is removing themselves from the rest of Britain with the willing help of our political elite.
More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity.
Typical knee-jerk reaction! The events in Woolwich are indeed very sad and disturbing, but your comment is far from helpful...
Helpful to whom? I'm not trying to be helpful; I'm bloody angry!
My wife is Turkish.
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
A Turkish woman falling in love with and marrying a British (I assume) man and integrating cannot be compared with Somalian gang culture in S London ending up with a soldier being beheaded in broad daylight.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
You simply do not get it.
His comment was: "More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity."
That directly effects several people I know, all of whom are a gift to this country. My seven best English friends all married foreigners.
And it also shows your stupid assumptions: my wife was integrated well before we met: our eyes first met over a warm signal generator, and she was schooled for some years here in the UK. But she is all too aware of racism and fears it, and is especially aware of the racism in Germany, which has been in the news recently with the cack-handed investigations into the murders of Turk by a white extremist terrorist group.
Comments
Any business backing UKIP 10% or less at 4/5 GE 2015? (Lads 8/13)
This effect is just as likely to come into play when comparing low turn out elections (recent locals, and next year's Euros) with the 2015 general election, which is likely to have turn out about double that.
I haven't said anything about what I think we should do about AGW, either to avert it, or adapt to it. Yet you are equating any action to deal with the problem as "economic suicide".
Whether that is the case or not it makes little difference to whether global warming is happening or not, which is the point to which I was responding. If we could simply agree that this is the case we would be able to have a more fruitful discussion about whether proposed policies to deal with the issue were economically sensible or not (perhaps with a slight diversion into why economic forecasts are even less reliable than climate forecasts, and so cannot be used to make cost/benefit analyses 40 years ahead).
So your time horizon stretches to just 100 years?
@BenM
Are you planning to live longer than that Ben ? If you seriously think you can predict how the world will look ten years from now let alone one hundred you are seriously off the mark.
Indeed it's quite touching to see how you worry more about the ramped up climate change than the debt mountain which will blight you kids' lives; the second will have a bigger effect on them than the first.
burglary to handling stolen goods
etc
then of course there's the literally millions of unrecorded crimes related to the grooming because it was ignored completely
So UKIP got 2.5 million votes in 2009 and just shy of 1 million in 2010. Now that a far smaller reduction that the 'five time' drop in vote share (see below) but still represents a lot of people prepared to vote for UKIP in a PR election, that (arguably) many see as being irrelevant, but not not in a general election that counts, and is also FPTP.
His dad is a farm mechanic and an uncle works for JCB, so he knows an awful lot about mechanics and electrics. And he will have seen petrol / diesel having been siphoned a few times.
The UK is not geting warmer, quite the opposite. If elsewhere gets hotter we can't stop it - we can only make a marginal contribution to whatever overall direction the climate will take.
For us the sensible policy is not to try to stop anything but to mitigate likely effects. If the sea is going to rise we will need better sea defences. I live in the Netherlands where half the country is below sea-level, literally. The runway at Schiphol is several metres below. BFD. It is manageable and at much lower economic cost than trying to stop industry. If greenies are worried we'll get wet then spend some money investing in sea and flood defences - but do NOT seek to ruin our economy on the altar of Gaia.
Let scientists explain what is happening - in a scientific fashion (conjectures, tests, openly shared and contested models, revisions, debate and a slow journey towards accepted models. etc)
Let politicians decide what is the correct repsonse based upon marginal cost / benefit. If voters elect those who say sea walls is more sensible than windmills then the scientists and greenies should butt out.
"Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate"
If the rest of the world wants us to adjust our policies to suit them, they could always pay us.
That said: if rising temperatures were to result in rising sea levels, then I suspect we'd suffer the twin perils of floods and freezing weather.
By the way, 200% plus national debt didn't stop the children of 1945 enjoying near full employment and cradle-to-grave welfare state. Get a grip.
Besides, I've just bought a house at the bottom of the cycle, so am covered either way.
http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/10436107.Police_called_to_Woolwich__shooting____live_updates/?ref=mr
è
As for what is happening yes the earth as a whole has got warmer. I happen to think it has more to do with weather others think it is human activity. There's no conclusive evidence either way.
"Although the study is based on US data, the researchers say the principle applies to other countries too: “There is reason to expect a similar trend overall in Britain,” said Dr Anthony Harris, the lead author of the study."
Or, of course, and more plausibly, if both measures, which are compiled completely independently of each other and look at crime from different end of the telescope (have you been a victim, vs did you report it to the police) are showing the same trend then perhaps, just perhaps that trend is correct.
Yep you just dont see violent crime like you did in the old days
Yet apparently it is essential we pay down our debt before Osborne's nanny calls him in for tea.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22531949
Poor show
'Three dead' in London street after armed police called to 'machete attack on driver'
Soldier wearing a Help for Heroes t-shirt was hacked to death by two men, it is claimed
Eyewitness says: 'They were hacking at him, chopping him, cutting him'
The two men were then reportedly shot dead by armed police
Police gave only said they were called to an 'incident' in Woolwich
Education standards are rising and crime rates are falling in Inner London thanks to thick white racists leaving for the suburbs
Translated by tim
As well as an assumption that we understand climate well enough to model it accurately, predicting the climate 100 years ahead requires you to know the world's population in 100 years' time; the average price of energy over the next 100 years; and the most significant technology developments over the next 100 years.
Nobody has ever succeeded in predicting any of the above, hence the entire exercise is fundamentally pointless, and in fact decadent.
In fact, to believe in CAGW you pretty much have to believe in God, for the reasons set out here:
http://omnologos.com/why-agw-is-logically-impossible/
Just awful. The posts underneath that story say the man was also beheaded....
Translated by tim
If HMG were really doing anything effective to control carbon dioxide emissions that would not have happened. Energy prices have gone up because oil and gas prices have gone up, because China's economic growth has increased demand.
You disagree with the experts if you wish, who despite claims to the contrary are open about the uncertainties in their judgements - they give a 90% probability that recent warming is due to humans.
It's impossible to have a debate when the facts are disputed.
The other factor that is of course relevant is the cost of the debt - interest payments as it were. And these are also historically low (and before people start saying this is somehow to do with Osborne, they were lower still relative to overall debt under Darling). So currently we are spending less than 3% of our GDP servicing that debt - that is less than any year you might want to pick from 1917 to 1999.
Indeed in the 30s we were spending over 9% of GDP on debt interest, and even in the early 80s this was more than 5%.
Somalian?
This is about choices, and about maturely understanding the consequences of those choices. I'd have thought this was natural conservative territory. You'd have thought that it would be the deranged loonies who think they can print money and never pay back debts without any ill effect who would be in favour of letting tomorrow worry about itself. It's a bizarre role-reversal.
Or maybe I can put you out of your misery
Blair/Brown - borrowing averaged 34% of GDP
Thatcher/Major - borrowing averaged 37% of GDP
But why let facts get in the way of a good argument, hey!
And if you look at the cost of that debt the difference is even more startling.
Blair/Brown - cost of borrowing averaged 4.0% of GDP
Thatcher/Major - cost of borrowing averaged 2.3% of GDP
In case anyone's interested, although it sounds great and uses the vacuum of space as the energy driver to suck up the water (a very clever idea from a 12 year old) unfortunately it won't work! When the height of a column of water reaches about 32 feet it collapses under its own weight (sort of) this is dependant on the air pressure around it. Therefore a column of water without an additional energy source would not be higher than 32 feet. It is possible to create a barometer using this effect with a sealed tube of liquid. Normally mercury is used as the column required is much shorter.
And while oil and gas have gone up due to demand, in the UK they would have gone up much less if "green" taxes hadn't been pushed up to ridiculous levels. HMG is still the largest cost component in a litre of petrol. If we want to stop CO2 rising then we should plant some trees instead of subsidising German wind turbine manufacturers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/22/woolwich-two-shot-in-police-incident-live-coverage
The record vote increase in a GE for any party in a single seat (ignoring by-election boosts) is around 25% or less (e.g. Redcar, 2010, Crosby 1997).
Conversely, very few seats have been won with less than 33% of the vote in the past 100 years.
Ignoring the special case of Buckingham, UKIP's best performances in 2010 were in the 8%-9% range.
Do the math. UKIP have to get very, very lucky indeed to win a seat from where they start in 2010...
Eastleigh, with its by-election boost, may be their best shot, although there again there are only a handful of instances of a (losing) party doing better in the subsequent GE than it did in a BE.
The discontent at established parties will remain, I think, but people will also be acutely aware that they'll be electing a government.
http://www.espn.co.uk/redbull/motorsport/story/108591.html
He claims Pirelli aren't doing a good job after a 4 stop strategy won the Spanish Grand Prix. For clarification, that's entirely different to 2011 when Vettel won the Spanish Grand Prix with a 4 stop strategy.
Alonso reckons Red Bull are whining because they're not dominant for the first time for a while:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/22624756
Probably true.
Lets celebrate our diversity.
"quoted"
These are official ONS data on borrowing and cost of borrowing;
you can check them out here:
www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN05745.pdf
or for a longer view, here:
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart.html
Also interesting to look at the better record of running an annual surplus rather than deficit.
In the 66 years since 1945-46 (up to 2012) there have been only been 11 years which recorded a surplus, of these 7 were during Labour administrations, and 4 under the tories (of which 3 were simply continuations of the surpluses from a previous labour administration, e.g. 1951-52 continuing 1948-51, and 1970-71 continuing 69-70 - interestingly in both cases the surplus under the tories was markedly lower than under the labour administration). None of the Labour surpluses were continuation of tory surpluses.
And you need to factor in that the tories have been in power for more years since 1945 than labour - so labour achieved surpluses in 7 out of 29 years (24%), the tories just 4 in 37 (11%).
Oh, I guess your response to real data will simply be insults.
"Murdered", unbelievably, is putting it mildly
Start with the government has moved several key chunks of spending off balance sheet on to PFI so the reported numbers don't stack up, then add in the unsustainable levels of consumer debt which fuelled government tax receipts and then ask if it was wise for a government to chose to base its tax policies on boom sectors such as housing sales instead of taxing Starbucks or Google and it doesn't take long to see that the tax base was a bit of a mirage. It has been the collpase of the tax base which has been the biggest hit in this recession and why we're simply seeing taxes go up to closer to what we spend. The UK is no different than those other "model" economies in Ireland and Spain which flattered themselves through asset inflation and cheap borrowing.
And so we find ourselves in the wonderland scenario where Osborne is still borrowing more than he takes in, has little to show for it, but somehow you insist borrowing another couple of billion will change it all.
Shame on you
From the comment above, I can guess that she is a much more understanding, intelligent and moral person than you. Perhaps I am wrong, but Britain has been bettered by the fact she has chosen to come over here and added another iota of diversity to the country.
Unless you care to disagree?
(As a sidenote: she has never been a victim of racism in the UK. Then again, her English is better than mine, and she looks Mediterranean rather than obviously from an Islamic country. She also wears western clothes. In other words, she fits in. We did see racism towards her in a small way on a visit last year to Germany. I want to stop that sort of thing occurring here. And your comments do little to help that).
Make of that what you will.
Home Secretary has called a meeting of Cabinet's Cobra emergency committee to discuss Woolwich machete death incident.
Government saying that this is a terrorist incident.
No one is saying all immigrants/immigration is bad, Mike K didnt say that either
Say no more
Of course it is selective, because in quoting the data you don't want to accept the off balance sheet liabiliities, nor do you wish to consider the ill-advised nature of a government spending splurge financed by a consumer boom. You do realise when Brown said he had abolished boom and bust he wasn't serious ?
But youre right it sounds more like violent Islamic terrorism by Somalians
Phew
So sorry, but these things need saying: a whole section of our population is removing themselves from the rest of Britain with the willing help of our political elite.
I am still with 6% as I have been for some time. Let's not forget that is another 1m votes on GE2010. 70% of that coming from the Tories.
What is it with humour and tragedy? Why is it so funny?
I am off to see a trick cyclist.
His comment was: "More evidence of our vibrant multicultural society at woolwich. Lets celebrate our diversity."
That directly effects several people I know, all of whom are a gift to this country. My seven best English friends all married foreigners.
And it also shows your stupid assumptions: my wife was integrated well before we met: our eyes first met over a warm signal generator, and she was schooled for some years here in the UK. But she is all too aware of racism and fears it, and is especially aware of the racism in Germany, which has been in the news recently with the cack-handed investigations into the murders of Turk by a white extremist terrorist group.
http://news.yahoo.com/german-neo-nazi-trial-opens-munich-084726894.html
Such sick comments as those by MikeK makes a German situation all the more likely.
The taller man was wearing a black woolly hat and the shorter one a green top, she said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/22/woolwich-two-shot-in-police-incident-live-coverage#block-519cfacae4b0e39288861439