I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
Let them have it. Where did it get us?
Dunno where it got you.
But according to Theresa May today, “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry, and more of poorest people in world will die” as a result of the cuts.
It was a Tory manifesto promise, too.
We could presumably give 30% of our GDP and then billions of lives would be saved, the Moon can be rewilded for alien orphans, and a hundred thousand endangered micro-lemurs can be put in crystal trees
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
Sir John Major really hasn’t pulled any punches. “It seems we can afford a national yacht that no one either wants or needs, while cutting help to some of the most miserable and destitute in the world.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
No, the right will win again and again on this, because the left is insane on Wokeness
Right wing people stay quiet, until the time comes to vote
A thread on the latest Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) paper summarising further modelling of easing restrictions for England (Roadmap Step 4 on 19th July 2021). 1/20 https://t.co/MigPGSd1ix
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
Let them have it. Where did it get us?
Dunno where it got you.
But according to Theresa May today, “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry, and more of poorest people in world will die” as a result of the cuts.
It was a Tory manifesto promise, too.
We could presumably give 30% of our GDP and then billions of lives would be saved, the Moon can be rewilded for alien orphans, and a hundred thousand endangered micro-lemurs can be put in crystal trees
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
Nobody’s talking about 30% though, are they. This is not a “hard choice”. This is an own the libs manoeuvre by the Tories; another footstep toward the gutter.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
The UK has failed to abolish poverty, so it has achieved nothing at all? What kind of argument is that?
Foreign Aid expenditure is, as you'd expect if you thought about it for three seconds, independently evaluated, like so
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
Let them have it. Where did it get us?
Dunno where it got you.
But according to Theresa May today, “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry, and more of poorest people in world will die” as a result of the cuts.
It was a Tory manifesto promise, too.
We could presumably give 30% of our GDP and then billions of lives would be saved, the Moon can be rewilded for alien orphans, and a hundred thousand endangered micro-lemurs can be put in crystal trees
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
Nobody’s talking about 30% though, are they. This is not a “hard choice”. This is an own the libs manoeuvre by the Tories; another footstep toward the gutter.
£20bn over 5 years isn't a nothing amount of money. We should save it. My worry is that Boris will see that £20bn and try and spunk £40bn on some Boris train or Boris road.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
No, the right will win again and again on this, because the left is insane on Wokeness
Right wing people stay quiet, until the time comes to vote
‘Right wing people stay quiet’
Yes, that is my main conclusion about right wing people.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
No, the right will win again and again on this, because the left is insane on Wokeness
Right wing people stay quiet, until the time comes to vote
And then they'll start yelling in the polling station?
I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
Let them have it. Where did it get us?
Dunno where it got you.
But according to Theresa May today, “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry, and more of poorest people in world will die” as a result of the cuts.
It was a Tory manifesto promise, too.
We could presumably give 30% of our GDP and then billions of lives would be saved, the Moon can be rewilded for alien orphans, and a hundred thousand endangered micro-lemurs can be put in crystal trees
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
Nobody’s talking about 30% though, are they. This is not a “hard choice”. This is an own the libs manoeuvre by the Tories; another footstep toward the gutter.
£20bn over 5 years isn't a nothing amount of money. We should save it. My worry is that Boris will see that £20bn and try and spunk £40bn on some Boris train or Boris road.
See John Major; after the “national yacht”, there’s the proposed bridge between Ulster and Scotland.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
The culture war was started by the left, and it's a war they're going to lose.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
Let them have it. Where did it get us?
Dunno where it got you.
But according to Theresa May today, “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry, and more of poorest people in world will die” as a result of the cuts.
It was a Tory manifesto promise, too.
We could presumably give 30% of our GDP and then billions of lives would be saved, the Moon can be rewilded for alien orphans, and a hundred thousand endangered micro-lemurs can be put in crystal trees
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
Nobody’s talking about 30% though, are they. This is not a “hard choice”. This is an own the libs manoeuvre by the Tories; another footstep toward the gutter.
We're going from a highly unusual 0.7%of GDP to a generous but more typical 0.5% - as aid
That's it. This is not the Scrooge of Britain condemning the global poor to the workhouse
And this is because we now have debt at 100% of GDP and very very scary finances otherwise, so we need to fix our own home before shelling out to build homes for others. That's all there is to it. If we go bankrupt, how would that help the many poorer nations and peoples we assist every year?
Honestly, the self regarding stupidity of the Left is quite beyond me
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
I think you mean Epping!
Ah yes. I wonder what HYUFD-9000 feels about this broken manifesto promise.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
The UK has failed to abolish poverty, so it has achieved nothing at all? What kind of argument is that?
Foreign Aid expenditure is, as you'd expect if you thought about it for three seconds, independently evaluated, like so
Knock yourself out with this and other accounts of how we have made some very hungry people slightly less hungry, even if not all of them.
But our poor are very much less poor than in the 1960s. It also wasn't achieved with handouts, it was achieved with a Thatcherite revolution of enterprise and work. Where is Africa's Mrs T?
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
On the general subject of the state pension: the triple lock is going to need to be reformed at some point, but the core problem is with the changing ratio of pensioners to the remaining working age population, and in the long run you only fix that by bringing the proportion of working age adults back up again.
The cost of all those extra pensions can be borne for a while by cuts elsewhere, borrowing and hiking taxes, but eventually it'll become unbearable and then the electorate will be faced with two alternatives, both of which most voters will find unpalatable:
1. Open door immigration for young families from low and middle income countries (the Ponzi scheme option) 2. Rapid and substantial increases in the retirement age (the work until you drop dead option)
Theoretically there's also 3. Mandatory euthanasia at age 80, but this might be considered a little too radical.
Anyway, I wouldn't entirely rule out (1) but I'm expecting (2). I'm supposedly entitled to the state handout at 68, but if I actually get it this side of 70 I'll be surprised.
I'd propose mandatory euthanasia for anyone proposing mandatory euthanasia.
I hope they make a tv series or film about this story.
A gang of alleged fraudsters who dressed as cardinals to trick victims out of millions of euros have been caught in an undercover sting operation by police officers disguised as priests.
Italy’s Carabinieri police set their trap after receiving reports of the five fraudsters tricking at least €1.7 million out of victims in 20 different scams.
Dressing as cardinals and priests, the men would offer business owners large loans on generous terms, all backed by the Vatican bank. All they requested upfront was a cash guarantee, only to vanish the moment it was paid.
In one wiretapped conversation, the alleged leader of the group, Lucio Cesaroni, referred to the extraterritorial status of Vatican prelates in Italy, and joked: “How can the Carabinieri arrest me? I am extraterritorial.”
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
I don't think that's the point @Nigelb and I were making: simply East Asia (and not Korea, btw - also ROC, Philippines etc) was a massive recipient of foreign aid for a long time, largely because the US saw it as the front line against Communism. It's therefore incorrect to say that East Asia lifted itself out of poverty without foreign aid.
If you want to draw a distinction (which may or may not be causative), aid to East Asia was largely direct government grants. The US provided 20% or more of total budgets for some countries in some years, while in Africa this has rather gone out of fashion, and instead charities tend to administer the budgets. This means more gets spent on direct things (like food and medicine) and less on Infrastucture.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
France doesn't send money. It sends chits, that allow foreigners to buy things from France. It enables them to sell lots of power stations in former French colonies.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
I’ll leave pontification about the onus to you.
Well, you can if you like, but it won’t change where it lies.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
£4bn is not a drop in the ocean, it is a massive chunk of the structural deficit.
The debt will erode over years so long as the deficit is closed. That is what matters.
Nice try but you seem to have a different understanding of numbers to me.
The current debt is £2,206 billion - the deficit in 2019-20 was £65 billion (in terms of what the Government had to borrow). I appreciate 2020-21 will look a lot healthier but are you suggesting we will have a surplus ?
I'm not going to argue £4 billion won't help but it's not some game changer. It's one step out of many we will need to take if we are serious about reducing borrowing and eventually being able to reduce the debt.
The attitude of some in the pro-Johnson camp last year was we can keep borrowing ad infinitum - perhaps but one day it will catch up with someone somewhere.
It's already clear some of the exaggerated promises of the "levelling up" vanity projects are going to be revisited - that's unfortunate and Covid was unforeseeable - but there have been and will be fiscal consequences.
If the pro-Johnson line is going to be to shrug and blame it on Covid between now and 2024, it may be honest for someone to come out and say so.
It may sound counter-intuitive but set aside the debt, that figure doesn't matter per se.
That debt figure feeds into the deficit figure of course via the annual interest payments and it matters in general, but realistically it is the interest and the deficit that matters annually - the debt is never being repaid.
What matters is closing the deficit. And indeed if there inflation and GDP growth faster than the deficit then debt to GDP ratio will shrink.
2019/20 figures are distorted by the pandemic, since the pandemic had already hit by 2019/20. 2018/19 borrowing figures were much healthier it was 1.9% of GDP or £41 bn so debt to GDP was falling since inflation and GDP growth combined to more than 1.9%
Furthermore £4bn of the gap closed today that's not "a drop in the ocean" that's fully 10% of the deficit that existed in 2018/19 before the pandemic hit. That's significant.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
By your logic you would eliminate all foreign aid.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
The culture war was started by the left, and it's a war they're going to lose.
You mean like Section 28?
The US right, even more hilariously, are pushing the ‘it was started by them’ line. Which is probably where ours have picked it up.
Tory poll numbers is still basically unchanged at ~42% (perhaps down 1%).
Anyone who can stare at the chart Mike posted and tell me that the blue graph shows Tory poll numbers as "still basically unchanged" is either living in an altered reality to the rest of the world or needs to go to the opticians.
A thread on the latest Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) paper summarising further modelling of easing restrictions for England (Roadmap Step 4 on 19th July 2021). 1/20 https://t.co/MigPGSd1ix
Did you intend to link to the thread? I’d be interested to see it please.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
Botswana has also been a pretty significant economic success story - and its GDP per capita has gone from a quarter of South Africa's to 50% more.
It's also a stable democracy, that's *almost* multi-party.
FPT - there are good arguments for foreign aid that might command public support.
The trouble is the wrong ones are being made by the wrong people.
Most seem totally tone deaf to this.
Instead of bringing the culture war narrative to it, what do *you* think?
Just seen this:
(1) I think it's wrong to enshrine a GDP requirement in law. I'd have it as a rolling target over 3-5 years - sometime it might be 0.5% and sometimes 0.9% depending on circumstance, such as natural disasters requiring a rise or poor strategic alignment and business cases driving a defensible fall - but with political accountability not legal sanction. (2) I'd link it to the national interest. We should have an aid & development review - like we do the defence review - that has a public debate. Aid should be directly linked to things like regional stability, climate change mitigation, migration challenges, and the furtherance of our values. (3) I'd funnel less directly through aid agencies "to spend" which I view, and I think the public views, as institutional largesse with some vested interests attached and run more directly from DfID along business case lines. I'd link everything back to strategy and policy. These would be publicly available for scrutiny.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
By your logic you would eliminate all foreign aid.
No, I just wouldn't go to Africa and tell people living in slums that a white London based professor says our aid has "helped" them.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
Hmm,. the original assertion in the sequence came from a bunch of liars ...
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
Hmm,. the original assertion in the sequence came from a bunch of liars ...
Really? I thought Jackie Baillie was Labour. When did she defect to the SNP?
Tory poll numbers is still basically unchanged at ~42% (perhaps down 1%).
Anyone who can stare at the chart Mike posted and tell me that the blue graph shows Tory poll numbers as "still basically unchanged" is either living in an altered reality to the rest of the world or needs to go to the opticians.
That chart is odds expressed as %-chances, NOT poll numbers.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
By your logic you would eliminate all foreign aid.
Put it like that, it sounds absurd. But it's a very popular proposition;
Within the poll, we further provided the UK public with a list of regions and asked which they would most support the UK providing development funding being direct towards, providing a ‘none of these’ option at the end of the list. Given this list, a significant minority of respondents (35%) stated that they would not support the foreign aid budget being spent at all. This figure included over half of respondents aged 55. Moreover, just 15% of 2019 Labour voters hold the view that the foreign aid budget being spent at all, in stark contrast to the 57% of Conservatives who would support not spending the foreign aid budget at all.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
Yeah I've heard some pretty depressing (but also hilarious) stories about aid programmes in Africa from previously idealistic young white liberals who thought they were going there to save poor people. It just ends up with them getting smashed on local booze in their compounds waiting to fly home.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
There's a Dilbert cartoon where he says he's definitely noticed less acid rain since he started recycling. Your position is the converse; you've been recycling for several months and global temperatures haven't dropped a bit, so what a waste of time.
FPT - there are good arguments for foreign aid that might command public support.
The trouble is the wrong ones are being made by the wrong people.
Most seem totally tone deaf to this.
Instead of bringing the culture war narrative to it, what do *you* think?
Just seen this:
(1) I think it's wrong to enshrine a GDP requirement in law. I'd have it as a rolling target over 3-5 years - sometime it might be 0.5% and sometimes 0.9% depending on circumstance, such as natural disasters requiring a rise or poor strategic alignment and business cases driving a defensible fall - but with political accountability not legal sanction. (2) I'd link it to the national interest. We should have an aid & development review - like we do the defence review - that has a public debate. Aid should be directly linked to things like regional stability, climate change mitigation, migration challenges, and the furtherance of our values. (3) I'd funnel less directly through aid agencies "to spend" which I view, and I think the public views, as institutional largesse with some vested interests attached and run more directly from DfID along business case lines. I'd link everything back to strategy and policy. These would be publicly available for scrutiny.
I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this.
However, these are not at all the arguments being presented.
Instead, the government has torched both a manifesto commitment *and* one of the final fig-leaves of Britain’s soft power leadership in order to “own the libs”.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
Postwar S Korea was literally the poorest country in the world. I’d say the aid program was unusually successful; the later democratisation bit probably wouldn’t have happened without prosperity and the higher education that came with it. But you’re of course right that aid alone doesn’t determine outcomes - and it’s entirely possible that it can be spent in unproductive or counterproductive ways.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
The culture war was started by the left, and it's a war they're going to lose.
You mean like Section 28?
The US right, even more hilariously, are pushing the ‘it was started by them’ line. Which is probably where ours have picked it up.
I saw one piece by a Trumper which in effect said the problem with race relations in America was down to African Americans wanting equality too soon.
They should have been more gradual in wanting Jim Crow dismantled.
He then went on a blocking spree when people asked him did he think the founding fathers should have waited a few decades/centuries when they decided not to be subjects of King George III.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
By your logic you would eliminate all foreign aid.
Put it like that, it sounds absurd. But it's a very popular proposition;
Within the poll, we further provided the UK public with a list of regions and asked which they would most support the UK providing development funding being direct towards, providing a ‘none of these’ option at the end of the list. Given this list, a significant minority of respondents (35%) stated that they would not support the foreign aid budget being spent at all. This figure included over half of respondents aged 55. Moreover, just 15% of 2019 Labour voters hold the view that the foreign aid budget being spent at all, in stark contrast to the 57% of Conservatives who would support not spending the foreign aid budget at all.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
Yeah I've heard some pretty depressing (but also hilarious) stories about aid programmes in Africa from previously idealistic young white liberals who thought they were going there to save poor people. It just ends up with them getting smashed on local booze in their compounds waiting to fly home.
Totally politically incorrect but Nigel Barley's The Innocent Anthropologist: Tales from a Mud Hut is a hilarious read.
A thread on the latest Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) paper summarising further modelling of easing restrictions for England (Roadmap Step 4 on 19th July 2021). 1/20 https://t.co/MigPGSd1ix
Did you intend to link to the thread? I’d be interested to see it please.
It may sound counter-intuitive but set aside the debt, that figure doesn't matter per se.
That debt figure feeds into the deficit figure of course via the annual interest payments and it matters in general, but realistically it is the interest and the deficit that matters annually - the debt is never being repaid.
What matters is closing the deficit. And indeed if there inflation and GDP growth faster than the deficit then debt to GDP ratio will shrink.
2019/20 figures are distorted by the pandemic, since the pandemic had already hit by 2019/20. 2018/19 borrowing figures were much healthier it was 1.9% of GDP or £41 bn so debt to GDP was falling since inflation and GDP growth combined to more than 1.9%
Furthermore £4bn of the gap closed today that's not "a drop in the ocean" that's fully 10% of the deficit that existed in 2018/19 before the pandemic hit. That's significant.
I see what you're saying and I'm happy to agree to disagree.
I'm probably one of the last fiscal conservatives still out there - I don't like borrowing numbers in the £30-£40 billion range on an annual basis even if (as you say) they are supportable in the short term.
We should be trying to look at measures to "live within our means" (as someone once said). The problem as always is the politics - the triple lock is completely indefensible, the abject failure to look at the rising cost of adult social care is also indefensible.
The truth is public services can't (as happened in 2010) do all the heavy lifting when it comes to deficit reduction. Taxes (direct or indirect) will have to rise - all of us will have to contribute to getting the deficit back down and start paying down the debt mountain. The trouble is, it's impossible to have a proper debate on tax (as it is on so many other things) because no one is prepared to argue a difficult policy if it's the right policy.
Sometimes in politics you have to do the right thing even if it hurts you and your party. The problem is you can't do that if you're a populist.
Tory poll numbers is still basically unchanged at ~42% (perhaps down 1%).
Anyone who can stare at the chart Mike posted and tell me that the blue graph shows Tory poll numbers as "still basically unchanged" is either living in an altered reality to the rest of the world or needs to go to the opticians.
Mike chart is NOT polling......its the betting market..... certainly seems like somebody needs the opticians.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
Age profile. Wales and Scotland are a bit older than England, with a slightly higher proportion of the population over 65 - 21 to 19.3 to 18.5 respectively (we’ve been through this on PB before) so they had more eligible sooner.
Wales also has a much more centralised health system with medium-sized local hospitals at regular intervals. Ideal for a vaccine drive with Pfizer.
Which does mean that Scotland being equal with England is an underperformance.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
It's been suggested that the Welsh Government took some chances with the amount of stock it held in reserve for second doses, knowing that it could always approach the UK Government for emergency extras if it found it had made a miscalculation. But I've no idea what, if any, truth there is in that theory.
Anyway, none of this should make any difference a few weeks further down the line. You'd expect that the end point of this would be that Scotland and Wales would manage to vaccinate a slightly larger percentage of their total adult populations than England, because England is a little younger and significantly more diverse ethnically - but the difference won't be that large.
Tory poll numbers is still basically unchanged at ~42% (perhaps down 1%).
Anyone who can stare at the chart Mike posted and tell me that the blue graph shows Tory poll numbers as "still basically unchanged" is either living in an altered reality to the rest of the world or needs to go to the opticians.
That chart is odds expressed as %-chances, NOT poll numbers.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
This is corner-of-a-pub-in-Chigwell chat. Depressing.
You might not like the conclusions mate, doesn't change the facts on the ground. The poor in Africa are still very poor, our aid programmes have achieved little to nothing to help them.
That’s not true, though, is it? See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
I mean that's the same as professors banging on about Eastern Europeans not holding down wages. It's bullshit with "evidence". I've been to Africa more than a few times, I've been to India a lot. My family has roots in both of these places. Whatever the reports and studies say it's just bullshit. You can choose to trust those reports if you want and simply ignore that Africans are no better off than when all of our aid programmes started. In terms of global wealth only Nigeria has advanced on the basis of its oil wealth.
So what you are saying is, you’ve had enough of experts.
I've had enough of white liberal professors driven by colonial guilt. Yes.
By your logic you would eliminate all foreign aid.
Put it like that, it sounds absurd. But it's a very popular proposition;
Within the poll, we further provided the UK public with a list of regions and asked which they would most support the UK providing development funding being direct towards, providing a ‘none of these’ option at the end of the list. Given this list, a significant minority of respondents (35%) stated that they would not support the foreign aid budget being spent at all. This figure included over half of respondents aged 55. Moreover, just 15% of 2019 Labour voters hold the view that the foreign aid budget being spent at all, in stark contrast to the 57% of Conservatives who would support not spending the foreign aid budget at all.
There's certainly a case to be made to let people donate to well ran aid charities if they want to rather than spending taxes on it.
The aid organisations I have the most respect for are organisations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation etc which have raised their money privately and have a ruthless determination to spend money on projects that work, not spending money on theatre of convincing politicians or the public to keep giving them more money.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
Yeah I've heard some pretty depressing (but also hilarious) stories about aid programmes in Africa from previously idealistic young white liberals who thought they were going there to save poor people. It just ends up with them getting smashed on local booze in their compounds waiting to fly home.
I think aid works - and works well - when there is sudden, absolute disaster. When a region is destroyed by war or famine or earthquake. Then you can move in fast and do great things, because there is no local bureaucracy or military to stop you or sponge off you
When you have systematic aid over many years you quickly develop a symbiotic culture of corruption, scams, backhanders, fraud, which in turn means the aid workers feel able to behave badly (sexual abuse, etc) because it suits everyone to keep it all quiet and keep the aid $$££ flowing
It it inevitable, it is human nature. The Mafia/Camorra/'Ndrangheta have spent decades systematically skimming off billions in EU money meant to "develop" the Mezzogiorno
FPT - there are good arguments for foreign aid that might command public support.
The trouble is the wrong ones are being made by the wrong people.
Most seem totally tone deaf to this.
Instead of bringing the culture war narrative to it, what do *you* think?
Just seen this:
(1) I think it's wrong to enshrine a GDP requirement in law. I'd have it as a rolling target over 3-5 years - sometime it might be 0.5% and sometimes 0.9% depending on circumstance, such as natural disasters requiring a rise or poor strategic alignment and business cases driving a defensible fall - but with political accountability not legal sanction. (2) I'd link it to the national interest. We should have an aid & development review - like we do the defence review - that has a public debate. Aid should be directly linked to things like regional stability, climate change mitigation, migration challenges, and the furtherance of our values. (3) I'd funnel less directly through aid agencies "to spend" which I view, and I think the public views, as institutional largesse with some vested interests attached and run more directly from DfID along business case lines. I'd link everything back to strategy and policy. These would be publicly available for scrutiny.
I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this.
However, these are not at all the arguments being presented.
Instead, the government has torched both a manifesto commitment *and* one of the final fig-leaves of Britain’s soft power leadership in order to “own the libs”.
Nah you're being ridiculous. The whole argument Sunak made in Parliament was economics. 100% about the economics and nothing else.
On the general subject of the state pension: the triple lock is going to need to be reformed at some point, but the core problem is with the changing ratio of pensioners to the remaining working age population, and in the long run you only fix that by bringing the proportion of working age adults back up again.
The cost of all those extra pensions can be borne for a while by cuts elsewhere, borrowing and hiking taxes, but eventually it'll become unbearable and then the electorate will be faced with two alternatives, both of which most voters will find unpalatable:
1. Open door immigration for young families from low and middle income countries (the Ponzi scheme option) 2. Rapid and substantial increases in the retirement age (the work until you drop dead option)
Theoretically there's also 3. Mandatory euthanasia at age 80, but this might be considered a little too radical.
Anyway, I wouldn't entirely rule out (1) but I'm expecting (2). I'm supposedly entitled to the state handout at 68, but if I actually get it this side of 70 I'll be surprised.
I'd propose mandatory euthanasia for anyone proposing mandatory euthanasia.
Sir John Major really hasn’t pulled any punches. “It seems we can afford a national yacht that no one either wants or needs, while cutting help to some of the most miserable and destitute in the world.
That’s not a Conservatism I recognise.”
What was the overseas aid budget when he was PM? Lets see....
Final bit on aid from me because my wife and I are heading out for dinner and a drink in a bit - aid spending and aid programmes in the UK (and the wider west) are driven by liberal white colonial guilt. We give money to Africa because we think it helps atone for our sins in Africa. Maybe it does, I don't know. It doesn't, however, help actual people living there. That's not what our aid programmes are designed to do, they exist to advertise that signal that the UK is "doing it's bit" to help the world's poor regardless of the actual results.
We dole out money to charities and aid agencies who in turn put out press releases telling the world how wonderful the British or Danes or Americans are for giving money to Africa for some new widgets they're definitely going to buy.
I don't have any answers on how we should run aid programmes, all I know is what we're doing isn't working. We're just giving the heroin addict their next hit or booze to an alcoholic. It might make them feel good for a few minutes, or a day but the underlying issue remains unresolved and soon enough they'll be back begging for more so they can get their next fix.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
Age profile. Wales and Scotland are a bit older than England, with a slightly higher proportion of the population over 65 - 21 to 19.3 to 18.5 respectively (we’ve been through this on PB before) so they had more eligible sooner.
Wales also has a much more centralised health system with medium-sized local hospitals at regular intervals. Ideal for a vaccine drive with Pfizer.
Which does mean that Scotland being equal with England is an underperformance.
Doesn't affect the point that PBUnionists were insisting that the raw data were very different even after they weren't.
Also - how accurate is the divisor used? How reliable are the popuilation figures? All those tales of Romanian window cleaners emerging frokm the woodwork to apply for their residency bumf. But a lot fo them have gone home anyway ...
It may sound counter-intuitive but set aside the debt, that figure doesn't matter per se.
That debt figure feeds into the deficit figure of course via the annual interest payments and it matters in general, but realistically it is the interest and the deficit that matters annually - the debt is never being repaid.
What matters is closing the deficit. And indeed if there inflation and GDP growth faster than the deficit then debt to GDP ratio will shrink.
2019/20 figures are distorted by the pandemic, since the pandemic had already hit by 2019/20. 2018/19 borrowing figures were much healthier it was 1.9% of GDP or £41 bn so debt to GDP was falling since inflation and GDP growth combined to more than 1.9%
Furthermore £4bn of the gap closed today that's not "a drop in the ocean" that's fully 10% of the deficit that existed in 2018/19 before the pandemic hit. That's significant.
I see what you're saying and I'm happy to agree to disagree.
I'm probably one of the last fiscal conservatives still out there - I don't like borrowing numbers in the £30-£40 billion range on an annual basis even if (as you say) they are supportable in the short term.
We should be trying to look at measures to "live within our means" (as someone once said). The problem as always is the politics - the triple lock is completely indefensible, the abject failure to look at the rising cost of adult social care is also indefensible.
The truth is public services can't (as happened in 2010) do all the heavy lifting when it comes to deficit reduction. Taxes (direct or indirect) will have to rise - all of us will have to contribute to getting the deficit back down and start paying down the debt mountain. The trouble is, it's impossible to have a proper debate on tax (as it is on so many other things) because no one is prepared to argue a difficult policy if it's the right policy.
Sometimes in politics you have to do the right thing even if it hurts you and your party. The problem is you can't do that if you're a populist.
I completely support bringing the deficit under control which is why I think the right decision was made today.
I don't see how you square the circle of wanting to live within our means and claim that cutting the deficit by £4bn in a vote today is "a drop in the ocean".
To paraphrase someone £4bn here, £4bn there and soon we're talking real money.
If you want us to live in our means and oppose this cut then what would you cut instead?
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
The UK has failed to abolish poverty, so it has achieved nothing at all? What kind of argument is that?
Foreign Aid expenditure is, as you'd expect if you thought about it for three seconds, independently evaluated, like so
Knock yourself out with this and other accounts of how we have made some very hungry people slightly less hungry, even if not all of them.
But our poor are very much less poor than in the 1960s. It also wasn't achieved with handouts, it was achieved with a Thatcherite revolution of enterprise and work. Where is Africa's Mrs T?
To be fair, the poor across the developed world have gotten less poor since the 1960s, and not all of them had Mrs T.
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
It's been suggested that the Welsh Government took some chances with the amount of stock it held in reserve for second doses, knowing that it could always approach the UK Government for emergency extras if it found it had made a miscalculation. But I've no idea what, if any, truth there is in that theory.
Anyway, none of this should make any difference a few weeks further down the line. You'd expect that the end point of this would be that Scotland and Wales would manage to vaccinate a slightly larger percentage of their total adult populations than England, because England is a little younger and significantly more diverse ethnically - but the difference won't be that large.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
Yeah I've heard some pretty depressing (but also hilarious) stories about aid programmes in Africa from previously idealistic young white liberals who thought they were going there to save poor people. It just ends up with them getting smashed on local booze in their compounds waiting to fly home.
I think aid works - and works well - when there is sudden, absolute disaster. When a region is destroyed by war or famine or earthquake. Then you can move in fast and do great things, because there is no local bureaucracy or military to stop you or sponge off you
When you have systematic aid over many years you quickly develop a symbiotic culture of corruption, scams, backhanders, fraud, which in turn means the aid workers feel able to behave badly (sexual abuse, etc) because it suits everyone to keep it all quiet and keep the aid $$££ flowing
It it inevitable, it is human nature. The Mafia/Camorra/'Ndrangheta have spent decades systematically skimming off billions in EU money meant to "develop" the Mezzogiorno
Given their behaviour in recent years the big aid charities are the last people I'd take lectures from on ethics.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
Postwar S Korea was literally the poorest country in the world. I’d say the aid program was unusually successful; the later democratisation bit probably wouldn’t have happened without prosperity and the higher education that came with it. But you’re of course right that aid alone doesn’t determine outcomes - and it’s entirely possible that it can be spent in unproductive or counterproductive ways.
An even greater success story is Singapore. It was a mosquito ridden toilet at the back end of the Empire with some nice buildings, a colourful-ish history, and no future, when it decided to go indy from Malaysia
Now it is one of the richest and most successful cities on earth. Astonishing
How much aid was it given? None? Trillions? I dunno, genuinely, but I doubt it was much
Of course it was hugely assisted by a numerate, ambitious high IQ Chinese workforce. And some gifted leaders
Perhaps some of the lads on here that like pushing the notion that Scotland’s vaccine effort lags behind the rest of the UK could explain why Big Jackie is lying?
I don’t know what the true figures are, but I would point out you and Stuart Carroll have just quoted Indie Sage as a source.
Whose figures have - so far - always proven to be false. Largely because they are bunch of third rate lying scum pushing a mad agenda who should be locked up.
So I would say nobody has proved Jackie Baillie is lying.
Can you find the accurate figures.
Sorry to hear that your ability to use the internet has been damaged, so just this once. I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
So roughly equal with England and a long way behind Wales.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
The way people write on PB, it's received opinion that the SG is massively behind. Even the more sane Tories said that very recently - but that was well after the crossover. It's weird.
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
Age profile. Wales and Scotland are a bit older than England, with a slightly higher proportion of the population over 65 - 21 to 19.3 to 18.5 respectively (we’ve been through this on PB before) so they had more eligible sooner.
Wales also has a much more centralised health system with medium-sized local hospitals at regular intervals. Ideal for a vaccine drive with Pfizer.
Which does mean that Scotland being equal with England is an underperformance.
Doesn't affect the point that PBUnionists were insisting that the raw data were very different even after they weren't.
Also - how accurate is the divisor used? How reliable are the popuilation figures? All those tales of Romanian window cleaners emerging frokm the woodwork to apply for their residency bumf. But a lot fo them have gone home anyway ...
I wouldn’t have used the word ‘lagging’ on these figures. But given its population profile, its ethnic makeup and its healthcare system, Scotland’s performance in vaccination has been less impressive than England or Wales. Not Northern Ireland, where different factors apply.
But that, to a great degree, is a sign of how successful England and Wales have been rather than a reflection on Scotland. France would bite your hand off for Scotland’s figures.
Superb by @Dannythefink - not least because every word of it is right. It used to be a truism that ministers tried to piggyback on sporting heroics. It's almost comically inept to have found a way to be seen as antagonistic to the England team
Sir John Major really hasn’t pulled any punches. “It seems we can afford a national yacht that no one either wants or needs, while cutting help to some of the most miserable and destitute in the world.
That’s not a Conservatism I recognise.”
What was the overseas aid budget when he was PM? Lets see....
I think this is the fundamental problem with many of the complaints. By making it an issue primarily of morals, which I totally get, it invites those comparisons to past governments in the UK or present governments elsewhere in the world, who may well be lower even with the reduction. Of course, if one sees it in moral terms failures elsewhere doesn't mean the decision here is ok, but it does undermine it for a lot of people, particularly when a lot of people don't like the budget anyway and others will be uncertain how much is the 'right' amount.
Selling it as effective spending is, of course, harder.
Marcus Rashford is an intelligent and excellent role model and the whole country should support him, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka against this racist abuse
No, I meant the twats in the photo waving Black Lives Matter placards, promoting a vile Marxist group which wants to defund the police, destroy capitalism, and break down the family. They are stupid arseholes at best
Rashford is an apparently pleasant chap, with a tough and interesting backstory, who has done really positive things, in his status as a multi-millionaire. He's not a saint, but he is a force for good, on the whole
These pillocks in the photo saying Black Lives Matter can do one
Looks like you lost your culture war, and didnt even get to extra time, let alone penalties......
The culture war was started by the left, and it's a war they're going to lose.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
Postwar S Korea was literally the poorest country in the world. I’d say the aid program was unusually successful; the later democratisation bit probably wouldn’t have happened without prosperity and the higher education that came with it. But you’re of course right that aid alone doesn’t determine outcomes - and it’s entirely possible that it can be spent in unproductive or counterproductive ways.
An even greater success story is Singapore. It was a mosquito ridden toilet at the back end of the Empire with some nice buildings, a colourful-ish history, and no future, when it decided to go indy from Malaysia
Now it is one of the richest and most successful cities on earth. Astonishing
How much aid was it given? None? Trillions? I dunno, genuinely, but I doubt it was much
Of course it was hugely assisted by a numerate, ambitious high IQ Chinese workforce. And some gifted leaders
And geography: being a natural port in that location was a massive head start.
Final bit on aid from me because my wife and I are heading out for dinner and a drink in a bit - aid spending and aid programmes in the UK (and the wider west) are driven by liberal white colonial guilt. We give money to Africa because we think it helps atone for our sins in Africa. Maybe it does, I don't know. It doesn't, however, help actual people living there. That's not what our aid programmes are designed to do, they exist to advertise that signal that the UK is "doing it's bit" to help the world's poor regardless of the actual results.
We dole out money to charities and aid agencies who in turn put out press releases telling the world how wonderful the British or Danes or Americans are for giving money to Africa for some new widgets they're definitely going to buy.
I don't have any answers on how we should run aid programmes, all I know is what we're doing isn't working. We're just giving the heroin addict their next hit or booze to an alcoholic. It might make them feel good for a few minutes, or a day but the underlying issue remains unresolved and soon enough they'll be back begging for more so they can get their next fix.
This is why I have so much more respect for programmes like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation etc than I do for Oxfam, UKAID and the like.
They seem to have business rather than political acumen at rolling out programmes for mass vaccinations etc
I completely support bringing the deficit under control which is why I think the right decision was made today.
I don't see how you square the circle of wanting to live within our means and claim that cutting the deficit by £4bn in a vote today is "a drop in the ocean".
To paraphrase someone £4bn here, £4bn there and soon we're talking real money.
If you want us to live in our means and oppose this cut then what would you cut instead?
I don't oppose the cut - that's a misrepresentation of what I actually said..
I also said this £4 billion was the first step - the significance (as you put it) may be that it is the first step.
What would you do to reduce the deficit? End the triple lock, come up with a funding solution to adult social care that recognises, as per the vaccine, we will have an individual responsibility to provide adequate provision for ourselves in older age?
On the general subject of the state pension: the triple lock is going to need to be reformed at some point, but the core problem is with the changing ratio of pensioners to the remaining working age population, and in the long run you only fix that by bringing the proportion of working age adults back up again.
The cost of all those extra pensions can be borne for a while by cuts elsewhere, borrowing and hiking taxes, but eventually it'll become unbearable and then the electorate will be faced with two alternatives, both of which most voters will find unpalatable:
1. Open door immigration for young families from low and middle income countries (the Ponzi scheme option) 2. Rapid and substantial increases in the retirement age (the work until you drop dead option)
Theoretically there's also 3. Mandatory euthanasia at age 80, but this might be considered a little too radical.
Anyway, I wouldn't entirely rule out (1) but I'm expecting (2). I'm supposedly entitled to the state handout at 68, but if I actually get it this side of 70 I'll be surprised.
I'd propose mandatory euthanasia for anyone proposing mandatory euthanasia.
Professor Chris Whitty @CMO_England As we move to the next stage of the COVID response, it is essential we change behaviour slowly and steadily.
These papers give some of the data which show why going slowly will reduce the risk to all.
Prof. Christina Pagel @chrischirp · 26m what does going slowly mean though? Are we each meant to judge for ourslves when it's 'safe' to move to the next stage? How? Based on what? I'd hoped that was what govt would do tbh.
I note that France is increasing its overseas aid budget to 0.7%
It really is filling in the leadership gap Britain has progressively vacated since 2016.
As I understand it, they've committed to "try" and reach 0.7% by... wait for it... 2025.
I reckon it's a coin flip whether the UK or France has a higher % in 2025, as of right now.
If people don't want to cut aid they could always pass a bill limiting public sector bodies to 11% pension contribution.....I reckon that would save 20 billion a year....nods. Might not be popular with some of course
Tory poll numbers is still basically unchanged at ~42% (perhaps down 1%).
Anyone who can stare at the chart Mike posted and tell me that the blue graph shows Tory poll numbers as "still basically unchanged" is either living in an altered reality to the rest of the world or needs to go to the opticians.
That chart is odds expressed as %-chances, NOT poll numbers.
The best argument I've ever heard against international aid is that we've been doing it for 40 years and nothing has changed. The budgets got bigger, the charity fat cats got richer but the poor are still poor and East Asia managed to lift itself out of poverty without aid.
Re East Asia, I don't think that's strictly true. Back in the 1960s and 70s, to prevent the spread of Communism in the region, they were massive recipients of American foreign aid.
But how much has Europe shovelled into Africa? It's still, frankly, a shithole that Africans want to escape from. You can't just look at American aid to Korea and say aid is a success. The west has collectively pissed away hundreds of billions in Africa and the poor are still poor, the dictators have got bulging bank accounts and charities have paid their directors handsome fees and defined benefit pensions.
It has to be said that aid to South Korea, the Philippines and South Vietnam in the Cold War was a distinctly mixed blessing. The corruption of Syngman Rhee, the destruction of Filipino agriculture and the annihilation of the South Vietnamese economy all spring to mind as unintended consequences.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
Postwar S Korea was literally the poorest country in the world. I’d say the aid program was unusually successful; the later democratisation bit probably wouldn’t have happened without prosperity and the higher education that came with it. But you’re of course right that aid alone doesn’t determine outcomes - and it’s entirely possible that it can be spent in unproductive or counterproductive ways.
An even greater success story is Singapore. It was a mosquito ridden toilet at the back end of the Empire with some nice buildings, a colourful-ish history, and no future, when it decided to go indy from Malaysia
Now it is one of the richest and most successful cities on earth. Astonishing
How much aid was it given? None? Trillions? I dunno, genuinely, but I doubt it was much
Of course it was hugely assisted by a numerate, ambitious high IQ Chinese workforce. And some gifted leaders
And geography: being a natural port in that location was a massive head start.
Lee Kuan Yew has a claim to being one of the greatest politicians of the 20th century. An extraordinary life. Singapore is very much his legacy
Comments
Stand Up To Racism. Organised all this, the BLM placards etc. Let's see who they are? -
Ah,
"Rabbi quits ‘anti-racism’ Stand Up To Racism over link to far left
"She left Stand Up to Racism, which is widely considered to be a front for the Socialist Workers Party"
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/rabbi-quits-anti-racism-stand-up-to-racism-over-link-to-far-left-1.490124
We are skint. We cannot afford to be giving away billions, not any more. It is sad but true. Hopefully if we can rebuild our shattered economy we can go back to being unusually generous. But to do that we have to make some hard choices.
“It seems we can afford a national yacht that no one either wants or needs, while cutting help to some of the most miserable and destitute in the world.
That’s not a Conservatism I recognise.”
Right wing people stay quiet, until the time comes to vote
https://t.co/MigPGSd1ix
This is not a “hard choice”. This is an own the libs manoeuvre by the Tories; another footstep toward the gutter.
Foreign Aid expenditure is, as you'd expect if you thought about it for three seconds, independently evaluated, like so
https://icai.independent.gov.uk/review/assessing-dfids-results-in-nutrition/review/
Knock yourself out with this and other accounts of how we have made some very hungry people slightly less hungry, even if not all of them.
I’ll let you get your Google-fu mojo back by finding the partially vaxxed figures.
Depressing.
Yes, that is my main conclusion about right wing people.
That's it. This is not the Scrooge of Britain condemning the global poor to the workhouse
And this is because we now have debt at 100% of GDP and very very scary finances otherwise, so we need to fix our own home before shelling out to build homes for others. That's all there is to it. If we go bankrupt, how would that help the many poorer nations and peoples we assist every year?
Honestly, the self regarding stupidity of the Left is quite beyond me
I wonder what HYUFD-9000 feels about this broken manifesto promise.
They’re not the example I would choose of successful aid programmes, put it that way.
See the assessments upthread; also @TSE’s post.
As for ‘me being unable to used the internet,’ the onus is on the person making the claim to provide evidence. The evidence you and your source provided was not evidence because it came from a bunch of liars. Therefore, if you wanted to substantiate your claim you needed to provide proper sources.
Surely 34 was too long?
If you want to draw a distinction (which may or may not be causative), aid to East Asia was largely direct government grants. The US provided 20% or more of total budgets for some countries in some years, while in Africa this has rather gone out of fashion, and instead charities tend to administer the budgets. This means more gets spent on direct things (like food and medicine) and less on Infrastucture.
I would make them favourites now. Overton and Carse are sloggers.
France doesn't send money. It sends chits, that allow foreigners to buy things from France. It enables them to sell lots of power stations in former French colonies.
"No one involved in murder during the Troubles should be granted an amnesty."
Maybe I'm naiive, but I'm sure there must be quite a few murderers with amnesties about.
That debt figure feeds into the deficit figure of course via the annual interest payments and it matters in general, but realistically it is the interest and the deficit that matters annually - the debt is never being repaid.
What matters is closing the deficit. And indeed if there inflation and GDP growth faster than the deficit then debt to GDP ratio will shrink.
2019/20 figures are distorted by the pandemic, since the pandemic had already hit by 2019/20. 2018/19 borrowing figures were much healthier it was 1.9% of GDP or £41 bn so debt to GDP was falling since inflation and GDP growth combined to more than 1.9%
Furthermore £4bn of the gap closed today that's not "a drop in the ocean" that's fully 10% of the deficit that existed in 2018/19 before the pandemic hit. That's significant.
Which is probably where ours have picked it up.
It's also a stable democracy, that's *almost* multi-party.
(1) I think it's wrong to enshrine a GDP requirement in law. I'd have it as a rolling target over 3-5 years - sometime it might be 0.5% and sometimes 0.9% depending on circumstance, such as natural disasters requiring a rise or poor strategic alignment and business cases driving a defensible fall - but with political accountability not legal sanction.
(2) I'd link it to the national interest. We should have an aid & development review - like we do the defence review - that has a public debate. Aid should be directly linked to things like regional stability, climate change mitigation, migration challenges, and the furtherance of our values.
(3) I'd funnel less directly through aid agencies "to spend" which I view, and I think the public views, as institutional largesse with some vested interests attached and run more directly from DfID along business case lines. I'd link everything back to strategy and policy. These would be publicly available for scrutiny.
But at least that’s no longer a problem.
If you need proof, actually go to a 3rd world country and talk to the aid workers. Not the bigwigs, not the ones in the air-conned Lancruisers - the young volunteers, of all colours. who do the grunt work
Get them drunk, let them talk, they are absolutely scathing about the venality, corruption, wastage and grift.
The weird thing is, this toxic atmosphere is mirrored in the HQs (in London, NYC, Paris, etc). Generally terrible places to work with venomous office politics
https://twitter.com/huwbbc/status/1415019701932105735?s=21
Within the poll, we further provided the UK public with a list of regions and asked which they would most support the UK providing development funding being direct towards, providing a ‘none of these’ option at the end of the list. Given this list, a significant minority of respondents (35%) stated that they would not support the foreign aid budget being spent at all. This figure included over half of respondents aged 55. Moreover, just 15% of 2019 Labour voters hold the view that the foreign aid budget being spent at all, in stark contrast to the 57% of Conservatives who would support not spending the foreign aid budget at all.
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/majority-of-uk-public-believes-uk-spends-too-much-on-overseas-aid/
But what I want to know is, what does Mr Drakeford have in his pants, or did someone in London make a mistake with their arithmetic when allocating the juice? Maybe the chap with the calculator was transfered from the Dept of Education.
However, these are not at all the arguments being presented.
Instead, the government has torched both a manifesto commitment *and* one of the final fig-leaves of Britain’s soft power leadership in order to “own the libs”.
But you’re of course right that aid alone doesn’t determine outcomes - and it’s entirely possible that it can be spent in unproductive or counterproductive ways.
They should have been more gradual in wanting Jim Crow dismantled.
He then went on a blocking spree when people asked him did he think the founding fathers should have waited a few decades/centuries when they decided not to be subjects of King George III.
@christiancalgie
Wow, 34% of 18-34 year olds have deleted the Covid test and trace app according to Savanta ComRes"
https://twitter.com/christiancalgie/status/1414985095174311942
https://twitter.com/EdMHill/status/1414646475368321038?s=19
I'm probably one of the last fiscal conservatives still out there - I don't like borrowing numbers in the £30-£40 billion range on an annual basis even if (as you say) they are supportable in the short term.
We should be trying to look at measures to "live within our means" (as someone once said). The problem as always is the politics - the triple lock is completely indefensible, the abject failure to look at the rising cost of adult social care is also indefensible.
The truth is public services can't (as happened in 2010) do all the heavy lifting when it comes to deficit reduction. Taxes (direct or indirect) will have to rise - all of us will have to contribute to getting the deficit back down and start paying down the debt mountain. The trouble is, it's impossible to have a proper debate on tax (as it is on so many other things) because no one is prepared to argue a difficult policy if it's the right policy.
Sometimes in politics you have to do the right thing even if it hurts you and your party. The problem is you can't do that if you're a populist.
Wales also has a much more centralised health system with medium-sized local hospitals at regular intervals. Ideal for a vaccine drive with Pfizer.
Which does mean that Scotland being equal with England is an underperformance.
Figures are here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2020#age-structure-of-the-uk-population
Anyway, none of this should make any difference a few weeks further down the line. You'd expect that the end point of this would be that Scotland and Wales would manage to vaccinate a slightly larger percentage of their total adult populations than England, because England is a little younger and significantly more diverse ethnically - but the difference won't be that large.
There's a clear dip in tory support. Yes, it may be transitory but denial is to make your own version of truth.
The aid organisations I have the most respect for are organisations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation etc which have raised their money privately and have a ruthless determination to spend money on projects that work, not spending money on theatre of convincing politicians or the public to keep giving them more money.
When you have systematic aid over many years you quickly develop a symbiotic culture of corruption, scams, backhanders, fraud, which in turn means the aid workers feel able to behave badly (sexual abuse, etc) because it suits everyone to keep it all quiet and keep the aid $$££ flowing
It it inevitable, it is human nature. The Mafia/Camorra/'Ndrangheta have spent decades systematically skimming off billions in EU money meant to "develop" the Mezzogiorno
https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/BN322-The-UK's-reduction-in-aid-spending-2.pdf
In 1995, it was less than 0.3% of GDP.
Coincidentally, the number of Test wickets Bob Willis took.
We dole out money to charities and aid agencies who in turn put out press releases telling the world how wonderful the British or Danes or Americans are for giving money to Africa for some new widgets they're definitely going to buy.
I don't have any answers on how we should run aid programmes, all I know is what we're doing isn't working. We're just giving the heroin addict their next hit or booze to an alcoholic. It might make them feel good for a few minutes, or a day but the underlying issue remains unresolved and soon enough they'll be back begging for more so they can get their next fix.
Wow.
Also - how accurate is the divisor used? How reliable are the popuilation figures? All those tales of Romanian window cleaners emerging frokm the woodwork to apply for their residency bumf. But a lot fo them have gone home anyway ...
I don't see how you square the circle of wanting to live within our means and claim that cutting the deficit by £4bn in a vote today is "a drop in the ocean".
To paraphrase someone £4bn here, £4bn there and soon we're talking real money.
If you want us to live in our means and oppose this cut then what would you cut instead?
Now it is one of the richest and most successful cities on earth. Astonishing
How much aid was it given? None? Trillions? I dunno, genuinely, but I doubt it was much
Of course it was hugely assisted by a numerate, ambitious high IQ Chinese workforce. And some gifted leaders
Good to have a more challenging target to bat out.
But that, to a great degree, is a sign of how successful England and Wales have been rather than a reflection on Scotland. France would bite your hand off for Scotland’s figures.
It used to be a truism that ministers tried to piggyback on sporting heroics.
It's almost comically inept to have found a way to be seen as antagonistic to the England team
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7d7ba5cc-e3f0-11eb-afdb-c7b01afbcfc5?shareToken=7678cf4992c0bd968d73f41557e50e38
https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/1415031525037547523
Selling it as effective spending is, of course, harder.
"Undertaker, make that FIVE coffins."
Hampshire to win by an innings tomorrow.
(OK, I know, they actually will, but a man can dream.)
They seem to have business rather than political acumen at rolling out programmes for mass vaccinations etc
I reckon it's a coin flip whether the UK or France has a higher % in 2025, as of right now.
I also said this £4 billion was the first step - the significance (as you put it) may be that it is the first step.
What would you do to reduce the deficit? End the triple lock, come up with a funding solution to adult social care that recognises, as per the vaccine, we will have an individual responsibility to provide adequate provision for ourselves in older age?
Professor Chris Whitty
@CMO_England
As we move to the next stage of the COVID response, it is essential we change behaviour slowly and steadily.
These papers give some of the data which show why going slowly will reduce the risk to all.
Prof. Christina Pagel
@chrischirp
·
26m
what does going slowly mean though?
Are we each meant to judge for ourslves when it's 'safe' to move to the next stage? How? Based on what?
I'd hoped that was what govt would do tbh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew