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Where’s the strapline, Rishi? – politicalbetting.com
Where’s the strapline, Rishi? – politicalbetting.com
Rishi Sunak set out a reasonably coherent economic strategy for the rest of the parliament at his Budget this week. Not that you’d know, because it was buried well within the speech and neither media nor politicians have sought to engage on that level.
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Rishi needs to focus on the consultations wrt the Budget and long-term tax things. "National Debate" required to squeeze the bush fires out of the narrative. £2m media suite indeed.
On the NHS, I would like to see the National Religion thing lanced somehow - it leaves the Govt negotiating with Mother Theresa and they can't win, rather than employees of a professional service.
Does not this sudden discovery of what they actually said before, give an only slightly embarrassing out.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for slogans. Get Brexit Done worked wonders for the Tories in 2019 and I think the suggestions for Labour in the header are good ones.
The budget revealed that Rishi wants to keep enriching pensioners, but it’s austerity for everyone else.
Since we went *in* to the pandemic with a terrible deal for workers and younger people, it’s a maddening prospect to think it must continue.
Labour don’t seem to grasped this.
How can I put this - a third of the cabinet are openly and brazenly in it for themselves, half are clearly and embarrassingly stupid. Which leaves only a small number of people like Sunak who understand both policy and politics.
The government get away with it for now based on simple reasons:
1. They delivered Brexit.
2. We're getting Covid.
3. Boris is a lad, isn't he?
4. Annalese Who?
Their problem is that the first two are transient, and the third will eventually (and rapidly) collapse when people realise the PM isn't wearing a fine suit of clothes but instead they can see his warty cock.
Unless Brexit is seen to start handing out largesse to the people who needed an economic boost - and quickly - then the "this isn't the Brexit we voted for" mutterings will grow loud. Freeports - enabling cheap imports by recreating EEA conditions and thus shagging local manufacturing - is a feel good headline sellotaped onto a calamity. I have absolutely no doubt that Ben "My SPAD gets paid far more than I do" Houchen will walk the Mayoral election on Teesside, but what then? It isn't sustainable.
I put it down just there. It’s gone. Has Priti been having trouble at the Home Office again?
What the Tories proposed around social care in 2017 was absolutely fine and a substantial improvement on the current situation. But they failed to do the ground work.
Ideally, you want the media to highlight the unfairness of the situation and then you can say how your going to fix it. Right now, I don't think people realise the inequality between people in care homes (you pay, if you have wealth over £23,000) and people receiving care at home (the state pays irrespective of your wealth). Similarly, the media aren't asking why it's right that the triple-lock is still in place despite the current circumstances. If Labour are to tackle this issue, they need some help (perhaps the Guardian/Mirror could assist) to get people thinking that it is a problem that needs solving.
I think they should be brave and do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do, but I doubt they'll risk it.
Getting rid of it is one positive a Labour Government might be able to deliver.
The 1% for NHS staff should be a nice political point he can hammer away at. For all of the clap for carers and posed shots in hospitals the government really don't care about the people who exhaust themselves battling Covid and pushing needles into arms. "Thanks for saving my life" says a grateful PM, "have a pay cut as a reward".
Not easy to do as people have been conditioned to divide and rule, nobody is allowed any kind of help (even a pay rise in line with inflation) because "where's mine". Regardless of politics we have to try and scour the selfish cuntiness from our society which multiple governments and their media supporters have actively encouraged.
EDIT: apologies for the term used above so early in the morning. But the people objecting to a pay cut for nurses because where's mine really are.
Politically this needs to be cross-party.
https://twitter.com/leicesterliz/status/1367391139624595458
Care? For the sick and elderly? Naah mate. I'm not paying for that. Until its mine that need it in which case the lack of help IS A DISGRACE.
If being in government is about sitting in the big chair, and double digit poll leads give you the horn, you never do it.
Prediction: this lot will never do it. Have they even said how they will deal with the obvious artefact of pay dip / pay surge back to normal over last year and this?
https://twitter.com/mnrrntt/status/1368117605379215363?s=21
At the very least it varies by area of the country (Scotland, plans in Wales, for free personal care), and by category of care services (eg personal / medical). In Care Homes there is a category distinction between (at least) 'Medical Services', 'Hotel Services' - maybe also 'Personal Care Services'.
There may also be a category distinction between Residential Homes and Care Homes, and between different types of incorporation (eg is VAT applicable).
I dealt with this for my mum in the last 2 years, so am reasonably up to date.
It is fearsomely complicated, and we were due to pay for everything except 'medical services' in I think all situations, as we had made planned provision a long time ago by keeping a rental property to pay for it in mum's name.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56301981
Do you think it might be different now? I get the impression that once someone has to go into a home, then the costs are met by the recipient if they have assets. And the Tories wanted to allow homes to be kept until the person was deceased.
EDIT: Just seen the extra bit:
It is fearsomely complicated, and we were due to pay for everything except 'medical services' in I think all situations, as we had made planned provision a long time ago by keeping a rental property to pay for it in mum's name.
The NHS workers are the public sector megafauna; Johnson and Sunak are going to get trampled if they don't change tack on this. Also the NHS are the single largest employers in many Purple Wall shit holes...
Personal Care Services are help in getting up, getting dressed, feeding, toileting etc. "Home Help" type things.
Hotel Services are things like room, lounge space, linen. The stuff that you get if you stay a month at a Hilton
I am not absolutely clear where things like Changing Dressings every day would fit. I'd guess Medical.
The people with the best information are probably Age Concern. Try the Home and Care section here:
https://www.ageuk.org.uk/services/information-advice/guides-and-factsheets/
(Would be quite valuable to have a Header from someone with a fresh eye on this, because you sink without trace.)
For a number I think Scotland does Free Personal Care, on which they spend £500m a year to service 42k people. Obvs a sample of service users rather than general population average.
The key though is to keep the truth veiled. Ratners error was to tell the truth.
*indeed Mrs Foxys engagement ring came from Ratners in Tooting Broadway.
Govt have misjudged this one imo.
On the IT side there is the fiscal drag that David mentions but there are at least 2 problems with that. Firstly, those who earn over £110k will be barely affected because they don't get personal allowances anyway (and they pay a significant proportion of all of the IT). Secondly, inflation is incredibly low so the "drag" effect is tiny.
The conclusion may have to await a more detailed analysis in the Sunday papers but the obvious one is that when the Covid related programs run down nothing is going to replace them and current spending is going to fall very sharply. We see a bit of this in the public sector wage freeze and the 1% for nurses but there is a hell of a lot more to come.
Rishi has played a combination of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy rather well. Can he play Mr Scrooge for 3-4 years of really tight spending up to the next election? Will Boris let him? My guess and hope is that the growth prospects will turn out to be a tad pessimistic giving a little more money for some goodies but the dream of driving the UK on as a scientific powerhouse investing heavily in new technologies and jobs is likely to have been a disappointing casualty of Covid.
And Charity run homes avoid (I think) VAT.
* Not particularly helped by passing away 6.5 years after making some major lifetime gifts. But it's a nice problem to have.
If they asked for that straight out, however, they would get 1.2%.
Similarly, I suspect the government will be willing to bend on this, but they want to be able to blame nurses and their representatives for pushing up the bill. ‘Well, don’t blame us for the fact there’s no money left. We tried to keep it under control but those people stopped us.’
It’s all rather childish but it suits both sides so doubtless they will continue posturing for some time yet.
All hands need to be seen to be dipped in the blood.
Social care is blamed (wrongly imo) for almost losing the 2017 election which is probably why no-one is keen to go near it and why the claimed cross-party talks have not taken place.
It also seems to me to be entirely legitimate to question whether a cheap face covering designed to stop viral load for short contacts in aseptic well ventilated spaces will be as effective if worn for long periods almost certainly over several days in crowded and poorly ventilated rooms.
Finally, it’s reasonable to ask how significant a problem it will cause in terms of lost communication especially for the deaf.
I know there was a study on this launched in Scotland last November - do you know if it ever reported?
But the impression I get is that is the first priority - which might then make getting a true cross-party consensus that bit more difficult.
Instead of a consolidated increase I'd find some money for a bonus and take it out of the apparently limitless Corona fund.
I am wondering if the government proposal to the review body is a negotiating ploy, the body will suggest a bit more and the Govt will say "oh OK then"
But 12.5% isn't completely unusual, PCS asked for 10% at the DWP last year.
The NHS is effectively a monopoly employer. Market forces work only by voting with your feet. I have been headhunted for NZ again this week, if I were 10 years younger you wouldn't see me for dust.
So far, so good.
Once the economy starts coming back to life, it make it more difficult to make that case, politically. Meanwhile the Himalayan range of debt still sits there. Rishi needed to be braver.
Although two Essex men are doing their best (Yes, I know Foakes now plays for Surrey but he's a Colchester lad, and if Foster hadn't been in place he'd have stayed at Essex.)
Edit: serves me right for tempting fate!
It’s also why I’m pondering options to get out. This just isn’t worth the hassle to be bossed about by crooks at the DfE and abused by the likes of Roger and Topping.
The truth is that that there is no turning back the clock, either on the outcome of the Brexit referendum, or to to a period of thriving towns based on manufacturing jobs on the old coalfields.
If Labour wants to win another election then it's going to have to demonstrate that it can give pensioners a better blow job than the Tories. Free personal care a la Scotland, restoring the free TV licence handout, ramping up Winter fuel payments, and shifting more (or even all) of the burden of paying for residential care from individuals to the general taxpayer. Do that and formulate a halfway plausible mechanism to pay for it (perhaps another 5% hike in Corporation Tax, shove the higher and additional rates of income tax up by 5p each, I've not done the maths but you get the general idea) and bingo - watch the arthritic troughers hobble over to your side.
In crude terms, get about 2,500 olds in every constituency to switch Con-to-Lab and that's the Government's majority erased and Starmer into No.10. Why wouldn't they at least try?
There's a further point that David doesn't bring out - Rishi has used his intelligence to produce a set of figures that project a relatively good (in the circumstances) fiscal and financial outlook for the country, with relatively little of the widely expected (and indeed officially trailed) increases in tax - but he's done so by a combination of assumptions that go well beyond merely optimistic, and hidden pain in terms of an Austerity II that is implied by the forward spending totals for government and councils, once you get beyond health and education.
As and when real economics doesn't live up to the assumptions, and when government actually needs to implement these spending cuts yet still hasn't done "enough" in terms of balancing the books, they may regret not making more of the opportunity the very unusual current circumstances present to be more radical. That higher rate pensions tax relief, CGT lower than IT, and the pensions triple lock (and indeed the stamp duty holiday) continue unscathed looks like a big mistake.
Either a plan for austerity, or an admission that the deficit will be substantially bigger for the rest of the Parliament would be more honest. Sunak knows this of course, but wants to pretend otherwise, knowing that his best chance is a consumer boom.
The Roaring Twenties were a US phenomenon, a country unscathed by WW1, not a UK or European one. Not just us, but all the European empires were skint then and having an economically grim time. It was the mid and late Thirties that our economy boomed, while America was in its Great Depression.
Wait until at least another 12 months before having the air to breathe life into some grand strategies.
I like this Government's pragmatism. And I think they're right not to pay nurses more than a 1% pay rise. This isn't the time for sentimentality. We will need to pay for their generosity on furloughs etc.
But for betting purposes I think Labour will score some success with this and that 13% Cons lead may be the last time we see such a large one for a while. People are happy to say they'd like to pay nurses more money. Until they're made to pay for it out of their own pocket. But it sounds good and it's fertile Labour territory. Maybe some betting ops out of this for the May elections.
The more radical solution, therefore, is to find ways of increasing revenue from the two thirds of pensioners who can afford to pay more, rather than the quarter/third for whom the triple lock has slightly improved things. A combination of taxation and NI measures could achieve this, or some form of wealth/property/land value tax. So I'm agreeing that the 'pensioner bill' needs to be reduced, but this should be done in a way that improves the lot of the poorest pensioners rather than making them even worse off.
I fear its critics have misunderstood both the economics and the politics. The political consideration is not to gold-plate Tory voters but to avoid the political embarrassment of Gordon Brown's 75p rise.
*Incidentally a great example of Ed Davey policy making in the coalition.
I have read some bollox on here but that drivel takes the biscuit.
https://twitter.com/hughrbrechin/status/1368139678566744064?s=21