I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Certainly someone needs to start thinking big, bold and out of the box. Four or five blockbuster retail politics winners (but costed).
Not convinced Starmer is that someone. He seems a very cautious type to me.
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
When the news of 9/11 broke, my girlfriend, now wife, called me at work in tears. Her best friend from college worked a block from the towers at the time. Wasn’t until hours later we found out that she was running late that morning and her subway got stopped well before ground zero. She did have to walk home across Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of others.
Today, or at least pre-pandemic, I work in the new 4WTC. It is sad to see so many people treating the memorial as just another tourist thing to tick off from their visit to NYC.
I did it when I went in 2014, but only because my friend wanted to. I found it a little mawkish, though it was interesting to get a sense of scale. They had the uniform of the seal that popped OBL on display, which made me think “only in America.”
What I found particularly distasteful was a group of Orthodox Jews who seemed to treat their visit as something of a pilgrimage.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Certainly someone needs to start thinking big, bold and out of the box. Four or five blockbuster retail politics winners (but costed).
Not convinced Starmer is that someone. He seems a very cautious type to me.
Sadly I agree.
I think it was a few weeks ago the Guardian had an interview where Starmer said he was going to 'paint his vision in primary colours'.
So far however, it has felt more like watching paint dry.
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
Though Blair's first term led to a collapse of turnout at the 2001 GE when it fell to levels not seen since 1918. There was a particularly sharp fall in the traditional Labour areas - and was the first sign of support disappearing in Red Wall seats.
Indeed. Mentioned as item 1 in the Newstatesman article by Harry Lambert which has been discussed on here. The article failed to explain or investigate why though. Disappointment?
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
I would just say polls indicate the public expect and accept taxes will rise not least to pay for covid
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
He's gone native.
What a shame.
I may be wrong but I think Rishi is driving this and I expect it to be part of a much wider change in taxes
The way the Times has it Rishi has been pushing back on it big time. It's Boris and Sajid that have been the main supporters. It feels like a leftover from the Hancock era that he should have binned rather than picked up.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Certainly someone needs to start thinking big, bold and out of the box. Four or five blockbuster retail politics winners (but costed).
Not convinced Starmer is that someone. He seems a very cautious type to me.
Sadly I agree.
I think it was a few weeks ago the Guardian had an interview where Starmer said he was going to 'paint his vision in primary colours'.
So far however, it has felt more like watching paint dry.
This redecoration must have passed me by because I have no idea what his vision is.
Last I heard he was touring the country listening to voters.
There's a hell of a lot riding on the leaders speech this year.
When the news of 9/11 broke, my girlfriend, now wife, called me at work in tears. Her best friend from college worked a block from the towers at the time. Wasn’t until hours later we found out that she was running late that morning and her subway got stopped well before ground zero. She did have to walk home across Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of others.
Today, or at least pre-pandemic, I work in the new 4WTC. It is sad to see so many people treating the memorial as just another tourist thing to tick off from their visit to NYC.
I did it when I went in 2014, but only because my friend wanted to. I found it a little mawkish, though it was interesting to get a sense of scale. They had the uniform of the seal that popped OBL on display, which made me think “only in America.”
What I found particularly distasteful was a group of Orthodox Jews who seemed to treat their visit as something of a pilgrimage.
I was there a year after it happened and it was still a shrine with so many pictures of the missing and dead on the wire fence. It was horrific.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
Though Blair's first term led to a collapse of turnout at the 2001 GE when it fell to levels not seen since 1918. There was a particularly sharp fall in the traditional Labour areas - and was the first sign of support disappearing in Red Wall seats.
Indeed. Mentioned as item 1 in the Newstatesman article by Harry Lambert which has been discussed on here. The article failed to explain or investigate why though. Disappointment?
Partially. But I was newly back in UK after nearly a decade in Asia. I had heard Blair was popular, but I wasn't prepared for the widespread consensus. Even from the Murdoch press. I have never known a more low profile GE. An absolute foregone conclusion from the start. No surprise then the turnout fell in Labour areas. In fact, other than Prescott punching that bloke, and Hague saying he would save the (unthreatened) pound, I can't recall any of it.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Of course, there is only so much Labour can say in the next couple of years - besides anything else, if they try to develop a firm platform the Government will watch to see which ideas retail well and then steal them.
What you probably want nearer the election is a combination of selected practical solutions to pressing problems, allied to one or two proposals to address Labour's weaknesses with the electorate. Something like:
*A long-term funding fix for health and social care, paid for by tax hikes aimed at above-average earners and wealthier pensioners *A boost in funding for scientific research, perhaps allied to a Government-backed investment scheme for tech start-ups *Guarantee the 0.7% target for aid spending, but also introduce a 2.5% or 3% floor for defence spending alongside it *Ambitious targets for building renewable electricity generation capacity, with a timetable for the phasing out of gas fired power stations (going further and faster than has already been proposed by the Government) *A new plan for increasing the supply of housing, to stabilise prices and therefore improve affordability
The final suggestion is going to mean making it harder for Nimbies to keep blocking smaller scale residential developments, but it may also need fresh thinking on larger scale supply. To avoid sprawl everywhere, I'd be in favour of targeting three or four existing cities, down South where the pressure is most acute - say Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and possibly Winchester - and making them all very much larger. Tens of thousands of new homes, with infrastructure like extra hospital and school capacity, zones for business development and public transport networks all planned and built alongside or in advance of the accommodation.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
He's gone native.
What a shame.
I may be wrong but I think Rishi is driving this and I expect it to be part of a much wider change in taxes
The way the Times has it Rishi has been pushing back on it big time. It's Boris and Sajid that have been the main supporters. It feels like a leftover from the Hancock era that he should have binned rather than picked up.
There do seem to be conflicting reports but no doubt more will be revealed from the 1922 meeting on Monday with Rishi
This is not the immediate story to be fair, the controversy on vaccines for 12 - 15 will dominate all the headlines next week
I expect the four chief scientific advisors will overrule the JCVI
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
But the public supported Labour's 2019 policies in isolation but they still lost in a landslide...
Promising the electorate that they will spend 47 billion squillion quid of other people's money on goodies for them is always popular, but the whole package in the round has to appear credible, as do the people selling it.
But the public supported Labour's 2019 policies in isolation but they still lost in a landslide...
Promising the electorate that they will spend 47 billion squillion quid of other people's money on goodies for them is always popular, but the whole package in the round has to appear credible, as do the people selling it.
But that is the point I am making here, I think the policies individually poll well but I am not convinced the package the Tories are making is popular.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Of course, there is only so much Labour can say in the next couple of years - besides anything else, if they try to develop a firm platform the Government will watch to see which ideas retail well and then steal them.
What you probably want nearer the election is a combination of selected practical solutions to pressing problems, allied to one or two proposals to address Labour's weaknesses with the electorate. Something like:
*A long-term funding fix for health and social care, paid for by tax hikes aimed at above-average earners and wealthier pensioners *A boost in funding for scientific research, perhaps allied to a Government-backed investment scheme for tech start-ups *Guarantee the 0.7% target for aid spending, but also introduce a 2.5% or 3% floor for defence spending alongside it *Ambitious targets for building renewable electricity generation capacity, with a timetable for the phasing out of gas fired power stations (going further and faster than has already been proposed by the Government) *A new plan for increasing the supply of housing, to stabilise prices and therefore improve affordability
The final suggestion is going to mean making it harder for Nimbies to keep blocking smaller scale residential developments, but it may also need fresh thinking on larger scale supply. To avoid sprawl everywhere, I'd be in favour of targeting three or four existing cities, down South where the pressure is most acute - say Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and possibly Winchester - and making them all very much larger. Tens of thousands of new homes, with infrastructure like extra hospital and school capacity, zones for business development and public transport networks all planned and built alongside or in advance of the accommodation.
Not sure about the aid target. Highly laudable, but do you want it on a pledge card of five or six key deliverables? I don't think it pulls in enough swing voters and that is what is key here.
The house thing should be first. Maybe go massively bold and "A home for everyone". If that means councils building like it is 1950s then so be it.
You have to be a bit careful on polling a policy e.g. do you want free internet...super popular...by the way, you won't have any choice, it will be one single ISP and they will only guarantee speeds less than what you can get now.....not so popular....
But the public supported Labour's 2019 policies in isolation but they still lost in a landslide...
Promising the electorate that they will spend 47 billion squillion quid of other people's money on goodies for them is always popular, but the whole package in the round has to appear credible, as do the people selling it.
But that is the point I am making here, I think the policies individually poll well but I am not convinced the package the Tories are making is popular.
It will be popular enough if they spare pensioners from having to contribute anything. The moment they cross that line - such as by trying to adjust or repeal the triple lock - I think they're in trouble.
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Of course, there is only so much Labour can say in the next couple of years - besides anything else, if they try to develop a firm platform the Government will watch to see which ideas retail well and then steal them.
What you probably want nearer the election is a combination of selected practical solutions to pressing problems, allied to one or two proposals to address Labour's weaknesses with the electorate. Something like:
*A long-term funding fix for health and social care, paid for by tax hikes aimed at above-average earners and wealthier pensioners *A boost in funding for scientific research, perhaps allied to a Government-backed investment scheme for tech start-ups *Guarantee the 0.7% target for aid spending, but also introduce a 2.5% or 3% floor for defence spending alongside it *Ambitious targets for building renewable electricity generation capacity, with a timetable for the phasing out of gas fired power stations (going further and faster than has already been proposed by the Government) *A new plan for increasing the supply of housing, to stabilise prices and therefore improve affordability
The final suggestion is going to mean making it harder for Nimbies to keep blocking smaller scale residential developments, but it may also need fresh thinking on larger scale supply. To avoid sprawl everywhere, I'd be in favour of targeting three or four existing cities, down South where the pressure is most acute - say Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and possibly Winchester - and making them all very much larger. Tens of thousands of new homes, with infrastructure like extra hospital and school capacity, zones for business development and public transport networks all planned and built alongside or in advance of the accommodation.
I definitely agree with all of this but I would like to see FTTP nationwide as another one, that could be a good "levelling up" policy
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
Tax and spend was the consensus amongst both Parties campaigns last time. Unfortunately, the PM got away with talking only about the spending bit. While Labour burbled on about the tax bit.
I can't remember the name of the documentary but there is one where it is literally 90-120 mins of that morning in real time via spliced together media / public footage. I found it incredibly hard hitting.
But the public supported Labour's 2019 policies in isolation but they still lost in a landslide...
Promising the electorate that they will spend 47 billion squillion quid of other people's money on goodies for them is always popular, but the whole package in the round has to appear credible, as do the people selling it.
It is difficult to outflank Johnson on the left when it comes to spending promises. He is vulnerable from the right though. Sooner or later financial rectitude will come back to fashion.
I see NFT land has gone even more insane now, people are paying $1000s for short sequences of random words and numbers....
When the merry go round stops, there are going to be some people out of pocket massively....
It's Tulip Mania all over again.
Absolutely.....so just like the gold rush, people selling the shovels made the money....i went and bought a load of the tokens they need for this silly game...
There are quite a lot of people who understand the technology behind NFTs who are going to make a killing out of this. There was a case on the news last week a think about a young boy who, aided with a bit of knowhow from his computer programmer Dad, had made something like £300,000 selling pictures of cartoon whales.
All the "investors" who are still holding these strings of code when the music finally stops may not do quite so well out of it.
I wish I had the knowledge and confidence to get into it. Oh well.
You absolutely don't want to go anywhere near it. Its a game of high risk gambling mixed with market manipulation where those in the club hype particular NFTs to pump them, just like so many crypto currencies have been used to scam the sheeple.
Many of those gambling crazy money only paid cents original for their tokens, so even though its $1000s and $1000s in todays money, they own millions worth of them, and 10 Eth only cost them $1 back in the day (and now worth $40k).
Yes the thing that is often missed is that the NFT creators have to pay hundreds of dollars to get their NFTs listed for sale and then again to cash out their token "gains"
If i wanted to make money I would create an nft token. Create an nft demoninated in that token. Wash trade it at an absurd value then collect the commission from the suckers, sorry i mean artists, who list their nfts using my token.
What are you doing for the next six months, @Alistair ?
I can't remember the name of the documentary but there is one where it is literally 90-120 mins of that morning in real time via spliced together media / public footage. I found it incredibly hard hitting.
Is it called something like 108 mins?
102 minutes. Channel Four used to run it almost every year.
When the news of 9/11 broke, my girlfriend, now wife, called me at work in tears. Her best friend from college worked a block from the towers at the time. Wasn’t until hours later we found out that she was running late that morning and her subway got stopped well before ground zero. She did have to walk home across Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of others.
Today, or at least pre-pandemic, I work in the new 4WTC. It is sad to see so many people treating the memorial as just another tourist thing to tick off from their visit to NYC.
I did it when I went in 2014, but only because my friend wanted to. I found it a little mawkish, though it was interesting to get a sense of scale. They had the uniform of the seal that popped OBL on display, which made me think “only in America.”
What I found particularly distasteful was a group of Orthodox Jews who seemed to treat their visit as something of a pilgrimage.
I was there a year after it happened and it was still a shrine with so many pictures of the missing and dead on the wire fence. It was horrific.
I was there by myself by coincidence on the fifth anniversary and it was still a shrine (though that may have been related to the anniversary). It was both horrific and moving.
That evening towers of light shone into the night sky which could be seen all over the city, again very moving. Spent the night in a quiet bar that I was the only tourist in at the time and memories of the day was pretty much the only thing anyone was talking about.
I see NFT land has gone even more insane now, people are paying $1000s for short sequences of random words and numbers....
When the merry go round stops, there are going to be some people out of pocket massively....
It's Tulip Mania all over again.
Absolutely.....so just like the gold rush, people selling the shovels made the money....i went and bought a load of the tokens they need for this silly game...
There are quite a lot of people who understand the technology behind NFTs who are going to make a killing out of this. There was a case on the news last week a think about a young boy who, aided with a bit of knowhow from his computer programmer Dad, had made something like £300,000 selling pictures of cartoon whales.
All the "investors" who are still holding these strings of code when the music finally stops may not do quite so well out of it.
I wish I had the knowledge and confidence to get into it. Oh well.
You absolutely don't want to go anywhere near it. Its a game of high risk gambling mixed with market manipulation where those in the club hype particular NFTs to pump them, just like so many crypto currencies have been used to scam the sheeple.
Many of those gambling crazy money only paid cents original for their tokens, so even though its $1000s and $1000s in todays money, they own millions worth of them, and 10 Eth only cost them $1 back in the day (and now worth $40k).
Yes the thing that is often missed is that the NFT creators have to pay hundreds of dollars to get their NFTs listed for sale and then again to cash out their token "gains"
If i wanted to make money I would create an nft token. Create an nft demoninated in that token. Wash trade it at an absurd value then collect the commission from the suckers, sorry i mean artists, who list their nfts using my token.
What are you doing for the next six months, @Alistair ?
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
To me this seems like a real opportunity for Labour to propose a different funding strategy and having that as one of their four or five policies - and then running with it. Tick tock Keir
I think if Labour proposed a wealth tax that specifically covered social care and was ringfenced perhaps that would be a good move. I agree that "just tax everyone more" as a means to pay for everything is where Labour has previously gone wrong.
They need to cut down the offer significantly.
Much derided these days, but Blair's short list of things they would do in first term back in 1997 seems relevant here.
I was going to allude to exactly this.
They need a package of I don't know, four or five things they will do and leave it at that.
Science and technology seem key, so I would do something involving FTTP if it were me but I admit that probably isn't very easy to sell
Of course, there is only so much Labour can say in the next couple of years - besides anything else, if they try to develop a firm platform the Government will watch to see which ideas retail well and then steal them.
What you probably want nearer the election is a combination of selected practical solutions to pressing problems, allied to one or two proposals to address Labour's weaknesses with the electorate. Something like:
*A long-term funding fix for health and social care, paid for by tax hikes aimed at above-average earners and wealthier pensioners *A boost in funding for scientific research, perhaps allied to a Government-backed investment scheme for tech start-ups *Guarantee the 0.7% target for aid spending, but also introduce a 2.5% or 3% floor for defence spending alongside it *Ambitious targets for building renewable electricity generation capacity, with a timetable for the phasing out of gas fired power stations (going further and faster than has already been proposed by the Government) *A new plan for increasing the supply of housing, to stabilise prices and therefore improve affordability
The final suggestion is going to mean making it harder for Nimbies to keep blocking smaller scale residential developments, but it may also need fresh thinking on larger scale supply. To avoid sprawl everywhere, I'd be in favour of targeting three or four existing cities, down South where the pressure is most acute - say Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and possibly Winchester - and making them all very much larger. Tens of thousands of new homes, with infrastructure like extra hospital and school capacity, zones for business development and public transport networks all planned and built alongside or in advance of the accommodation.
Not sure about the aid target. Highly laudable, but do you want it on a pledge card of five or six key deliverables? I don't think it pulls in enough swing voters and that is what is key here.
The house thing should be first. Maybe go massively bold and "A home for everyone". If that means councils building like it is 1950s then so be it.
That's why I suggested tying aid hypothecation to increased guaranteed funding for defence. It can be presented as two facets of the same plan. We make ourselves safer at home both by improving conditions for people abroad and by creating a more robust shield. Aid is red meat for the metropolitan base; defence demonstrates that Labour's interested in and approves of national strength, and isn't all about patting refugees on the head and harping on about colonial guilt.
The regulations governing mass housebuilding are going to need to be carefully considered and put in place by a competent secretary of state or else we'll end up in even worse trouble than we are already. The construction of horrible little shoebox flats and rabbit hutch houses, without any associated infrastructure being put in place and sometimes shoddily constructed to boot, needs to stop.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Far easier is to just fuck the young, again.
It's about time we abolish the state pension to pay for social care. If you're 60+ and haven't saved enough to retire then it's no one's fault but your own, especially in today's pension opt-out world.
At least with Corbyn I'd have got a few more bank holidays.
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
I was 14 at the time, so things can seem bigger than they are at such an age, but I remember feeling genuinely scared by my uncle’s view that “this was just the beginning.” There were all those scares about anthrax and dirty bombs. But I think you’re right, as visually dramatic as it was, it wasn’t such a big deal.
Funnily enough, I was also genuinely spooked by the SARS outbreak. But then as I got older, I started to think these things get overhyped. And then COVID came along.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
To me this seems like a real opportunity for Labour to propose a different funding strategy and having that as one of their four or five policies - and then running with it. Tick tock Keir
It may be that neither party dares to soak pensioners, but given how heavily reliant the Tories are on the grey vote it's most likely to be Labour that will cross the Rubicon if either of them is going to.
We already know from the Dementia Tax debacle the extent and volume of howling to be expected the nanosecond that anyone proposes that the retired be made to stump up for anything, even if it's only the better-off ones. Certainly it'll take about five seconds for Age UK and other elderly lobbies to start painting pictures of frail, vulnerable little old ladies being forced to decide whether to use a fan heater to keep warm or a ring on the hob to cook their dinner - or, for that matter, whether to buy food for the cat or food for themselves. It's going to take a lot of sticking power to see off that sort of pleading.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
He's gone native.
What a shame.
I may be wrong but I think Rishi is driving this and I expect it to be part of a much wider change in taxes
The way the Times has it Rishi has been pushing back on it big time. It's Boris and Sajid that have been the main supporters. It feels like a leftover from the Hancock era that he should have binned rather than picked up.
I still have no idea how they haven't picked up on the relatively free win of merging cap gains and income tax. I'm not certain on the exact maths, but I'm fairly certain that you can frame it as giving the majority of people a pay rise (by raising the threshold from 12.5k to 15k, and 50k to 55k/60k), while rolling all cap gains into income tax, resulting in it being a net positive in terms of tax take.
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
It did change everything. It was the moment the West toppled, and began to fall, especially America
All that came after, Afghanistan (an actual reaction) to Iraq, to the Crash, has only speeded that relative decline
It was a monumental inflection point. America was at the peak of post-communist imperial swagger, the USA was the unchallenged Hegemon, the mono-power. Supreme. China was an intriguing joke on a distant horizon. Then two planes hit two towers, and it all changed
Historians will date all 21st century things from that day
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
I was 14 at the time, so things can seem bigger than they are at such an age, but I remember feeling genuinely scared by my uncle’s view that “this was just the beginning.” There were all those scares about anthrax and dirty bombs. But I think you’re right, as visually dramatic as it was, it wasn’t such a big deal.
Funnily enough, I was also genuinely spooked by the SARS outbreak. But then as I got older, I started to think these things get overhyped. And then COVID came along.
I was bunking off Sixth Form at the time and messing around on the net when suddenly bits of it started to buckle under the weight of everyone logging on to try and see what was happening.
I see NFT land has gone even more insane now, people are paying $1000s for short sequences of random words and numbers....
When the merry go round stops, there are going to be some people out of pocket massively....
It's Tulip Mania all over again.
Absolutely.....so just like the gold rush, people selling the shovels made the money....i went and bought a load of the tokens they need for this silly game...
There are quite a lot of people who understand the technology behind NFTs who are going to make a killing out of this. There was a case on the news last week a think about a young boy who, aided with a bit of knowhow from his computer programmer Dad, had made something like £300,000 selling pictures of cartoon whales.
All the "investors" who are still holding these strings of code when the music finally stops may not do quite so well out of it.
I wish I had the knowledge and confidence to get into it. Oh well.
You absolutely don't want to go anywhere near it. Its a game of high risk gambling mixed with market manipulation where those in the club hype particular NFTs to pump them, just like so many crypto currencies have been used to scam the sheeple.
Many of those gambling crazy money only paid cents original for their tokens, so even though its $1000s and $1000s in todays money, they own millions worth of them, and 10 Eth only cost them $1 back in the day (and now worth $40k).
Yes the thing that is often missed is that the NFT creators have to pay hundreds of dollars to get their NFTs listed for sale and then again to cash out their token "gains"
If i wanted to make money I would create an nft token. Create an nft demoninated in that token. Wash trade it at an absurd value then collect the commission from the suckers, sorry i mean artists, who list their nfts using my token.
What are you doing for the next six months, @Alistair ?
Not grappling with moral dilemmas that's for sure.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
There is absolutely no evidence cutting taxes below 40% of GDP increases growth rates. There are some that would keep cutting spending and taxes until we get to what the US has: a military, an insurance scheme and very little else.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
He's gone native.
What a shame.
I may be wrong but I think Rishi is driving this and I expect it to be part of a much wider change in taxes
The way the Times has it Rishi has been pushing back on it big time. It's Boris and Sajid that have been the main supporters. It feels like a leftover from the Hancock era that he should have binned rather than picked up.
I still have no idea how they haven't picked up on the relatively free win of merging cap gains and income tax. I'm not certain on the exact maths, but I'm fairly certain that you can frame it as giving the majority of people a pay rise (by raising the threshold from 12.5k to 15k, and 50k to 55k/60k), while rolling all cap gains into income tax, resulting in it being a net positive in terms of tax take.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
Absolutely correct as usual Big G.
People like @MaxPB and Philip Thompson live in a fantasy world and don't understand that wealthy people such as they need to contribute to Society rather than just being focused on their own pockets.
I who am noted for being moderate and centre on here am proud to confirm that in my last 10 years of working I paid (approx) £1m tax and NI. It showed that I paid my way as well as being massively successful. 👍
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
I was 14 at the time, so things can seem bigger than they are at such an age, but I remember feeling genuinely scared by my uncle’s view that “this was just the beginning.” There were all those scares about anthrax and dirty bombs. But I think you’re right, as visually dramatic as it was, it wasn’t such a big deal.
Funnily enough, I was also genuinely spooked by the SARS outbreak. But then as I got older, I started to think these things get overhyped. And then COVID came along.
I was bunking off Sixth Form at the time and messing around on the net when suddenly bits of it started to buckle under the weight of everyone logging on to try and see what was happening.
I was in the Faculty Library in Edinburgh when the internet completely crashed. No one knew what had happened. My wife phoned and said that planes had flown into the twin towers. It was utterly shocking. I packed up and went home listening to radio all the way and in tears.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
They have nowhere else to go. They'll grumble a bit and go and vote Tory in 2024. Working age people have no such difficulty. I live in a marginal seat, it's a nailed on Tory loss at this rate. I'm not even talking about taxing all pensioners more, just the 2m higher rate ones.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
I'm going to hazard a guess that your income is in the top 5% bracket.
I genuinely struggle to understand why you are so vehement about not wanting to pay a penny more in tax.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
And of course even if we cut taxes and the economy did grow faster, the deficit would still be wider overall and they would use the situation as a reason to cut taxes again. Soon you end up like the clusterfuck in Kansas. It is zealotry, uninformed by real world evidence. They talk about the Laffer curve, but pretend there isn't a left hand side of it.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
They have nowhere else to go. They'll grumble a bit and go and vote Tory in 2024. Working age people have no such difficulty. I live in a marginal seat, it's a nailed on Tory loss at this rate. I'm not even talking about taxing all pensioners more, just the 2m higher rate ones.
Just because they don't fancy voting for anyone else, doesn't necessarily mean they won't protest by staying at home and sitting on their hands. That is the Government's entire problem.
It's like when the Lib Dems dumped their opposition to tuition fees. You piss on your supporters at your peril.
When the news of 9/11 broke, my girlfriend, now wife, called me at work in tears. Her best friend from college worked a block from the towers at the time. Wasn’t until hours later we found out that she was running late that morning and her subway got stopped well before ground zero. She did have to walk home across Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of others.
Today, or at least pre-pandemic, I work in the new 4WTC. It is sad to see so many people treating the memorial as just another tourist thing to tick off from their visit to NYC.
Or to use the kindertransport statues at Liverpool Street as somewhere to discard coffee cups.
ETA but maybe that is what happens to memorials with the passage of time. Do we think badly of tourists visiting the Vietnam war memorial? Or Trafalgar Square?
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
Absolutely correct as usual Big G.
People like @MaxPB and Philip Thompson live in a fantasy world and don't understand that wealthy people such as they need to contribute to Society rather than just being focused on their own pockets.
I who am noted for being moderate and centre on here am proud to confirm that in my last 10 years of working I paid (approx) £1m tax and NI. It showed that I paid my way as well as being massively successful. 👍
My net rate of tax was 42% last year. Get off your high horse, you're not the only person with an annual six figure tax bill and I'll be paying it for many more years than you did.
My own situation isn't relevant, my issue is working people on modest incomes being forced to pay when there's rich pensioners who can easily be taxed at source for significantly more than they pay now and have their state pension tapered down to zero from £50k+
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
They have nowhere else to go. They'll grumble a bit and go and vote Tory in 2024. Working age people have no such difficulty. I live in a marginal seat, it's a nailed on Tory loss at this rate. I'm not even talking about taxing all pensioners more, just the 2m higher rate ones.
To be honest that was not the impression you gave me and maybe I misunderstood
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
It did change everything. It was the moment the West toppled, and began to fall, especially America
All that came after, Afghanistan (an actual reaction) to Iraq, to the Crash, has only speeded that relative decline
It was a monumental inflection point. America was at the peak of post-communist imperial swagger, the USA was the unchallenged Hegemon, the mono-power. Supreme. China was an intriguing joke on a distant horizon. Then two planes hit two towers, and it all changed
Historians will date all 21st century things from that day
I agree with that. I was meaning on a more personal level. People continued to fly. Live and work in tall buildings. Cities, particularly the centres continued their rapid growth. There was no war with conscription. No economic shockwave. For the vast majority life continued as if nowt had happened.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
Exactly, home owning over 65s are the Tories core vote and those in the 45-65 bracket who own property and are waiting for an inheritance are who won the Tories the last general election.
Even in 2019 Labour won under 44s so they can largely be ignored as far as the Tories are concerned, most of the under 40s are not voting Tory
I was scheduled in be in the twin towers same day the following week at same time the first plane hit ....i was in North America at the time and got stuck there for 3 weeks as i was flying back out of NY and it was total chaos.
I remember later that week buying Time magazine, has an iconic front cover, as I was stuck in a hotel, trying to work out what to do.
A friend from university was at the twin towers the Friday before and was due to fly back to the UK on 9/11.
It was an expensive few days for him, trying to find somewhere to stay. Even found a hotel where they charged by the hour.
My 9/11 is very low key, but may also be very unusual.
I was on a remote French campsite in the Albi area and did not see the news for another three days. I must be one of very, very few western people who did not watch live or almost live TV footage that day.
Me and the soon to be Mrs, had no idea. None. Completely unaware. The campsite was, as is the way in rural France in September, empty.
The first we heard about any of it was three days later when we moved from the campsite to a B&B as we got ready for the long drive home. The place was owned by two Brits and as we piled through the front door they said, 'what about new york? terrible, terrible news.' etc etc.
Not days, but I didn't find out for about seven hours after it happened.
I was working at the time in McDonalds, and nobody discussed it at all when it happened remarkably so I simply never found out. At lunchtime the TV in the break room was off, I considered putting it on but thought there's never anything on TV in the daytime so decided against it. At the end of my shift took the bus home, stopped at a supermarket and browsed the electronics section - all the TVs were on a DVD none of them on live TV.
Only when I got home did I eventually find out. Got home and my brother said had I heard the Twin Towers were destroyed, and I thought he meant Wembley stadium until I saw the news.
PS one thing I do remember is that there was a story in The Times I'd read on the bus in the way in that morning about the Taliban and the destruction of ancient cultural artefacts that had just occurred at the time.
Bloody hell. That's quite a remarkable piece of avoidance. I wonder if they switched to DVD on purpose? Must have.
They must have. Would have been very depressing to have that on multiple screens.
"Depressing?"
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Agree with the not wanting to be alone bit. I was living in a Coronation Street type terrace in Bolton. Cobbles and all. So we knew the neighbours well. But EVERYONE, young and old, white, black and Asian, spent the evening on the street. Milling about. Talking it through. Processing. We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again. Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
I was 14 at the time, so things can seem bigger than they are at such an age, but I remember feeling genuinely scared by my uncle’s view that “this was just the beginning.” There were all those scares about anthrax and dirty bombs. But I think you’re right, as visually dramatic as it was, it wasn’t such a big deal.
Funnily enough, I was also genuinely spooked by the SARS outbreak. But then as I got older, I started to think these things get overhyped. And then COVID came along.
I was bunking off Sixth Form at the time and messing around on the net when suddenly bits of it started to buckle under the weight of everyone logging on to try and see what was happening.
I was in the Faculty Library in Edinburgh when the internet completely crashed. No one knew what had happened. My wife phoned and said that planes had flown into the twin towers. It was utterly shocking. I packed up and went home listening to radio all the way and in tears.
We only had dialup at home at the time and I managed to maintain the underlying connection. But everything got flaky - msn messenger, irc, then the big news sites, then the messages boards that were mirroring text from the big sites. I think I spent a chunk of the first hour trying to keep up with stuff via Slashdot of all places.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Far easier is to just fuck the young, again.
It's about time we abolish the state pension to pay for social care. If you're 60+ and haven't saved enough to retire then it's no one's fault but your own, especially in today's pension opt-out world.
At least with Corbyn I'd have got a few more bank holidays.
Yes but not great to have so many in winter (the 4 were the saints days of England, Scotland Wales and Ireland). Nothing to do but sit inside in the rain reading Marx or allotment seed catalogues...
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
Absolutely correct as usual Big G.
People like @MaxPB and Philip Thompson live in a fantasy world and don't understand that wealthy people such as they need to contribute to Society rather than just being focused on their own pockets.
I who am noted for being moderate and centre on here am proud to confirm that in my last 10 years of working I paid (approx) £1m tax and NI. It showed that I paid my way as well as being massively successful. 👍
My net rate of tax was 42% last year. Get off your high horse, you're not the only person with an annual six figure tax bill and I'll be paying it for many more years than you did.
My own situation isn't relevant, my issue is working people on modest incomes being forced to pay when there's rich pensioners who can easily be taxed at source for significantly more than they pay now and have their state pension tapered down to zero from £50k+
I have no idea how a pensioners receives a state pension of £50,000
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
They have nowhere else to go. They'll grumble a bit and go and vote Tory in 2024. Working age people have no such difficulty. I live in a marginal seat, it's a nailed on Tory loss at this rate. I'm not even talking about taxing all pensioners more, just the 2m higher rate ones.
Tories can afford to lose a few high earning voters like you to the LDs, many of them Remainers anyway, they cannot afford to lose homeowning Leave voting pensioners in the RedWall to Farage or Labour nor can they afford to lose their homeowning Leave voting retired core vote in the South to Farage or the LDs
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
They have nowhere else to go. They'll grumble a bit and go and vote Tory in 2024. Working age people have no such difficulty. I live in a marginal seat, it's a nailed on Tory loss at this rate. I'm not even talking about taxing all pensioners more, just the 2m higher rate ones.
Just because they don't fancy voting for anyone else, doesn't necessarily mean they won't protest by staying at home and sitting on their hands. That is the Government's entire problem.
It's like when the Lib Dems dumped their opposition to tuition fees. You piss on your supporters at your peril.
Part of the magic of 2019 was that the Conservatives did, to quite a large extent, gain new voters in the Red Wall without losing many of them elsewhere. Fans of Greive, Soubry et al went, but they didn't add up to enough to tip many seats. Whether that trick is sustainable remains to be seen.
The government's underlying problem is that it won by persuading people that a wall of money could be released by leaving the EU and that no tough financial decisions would be needed on anything because everyone would be a mega winner.
It was always a con, the trouble is that governments can't do the equivalent of running from the restaurant at the moment the waiter realises the credit card is a dud.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
And of course even if we cut taxes and the economy did grow faster, the deficit would still be wider overall and they would use the situation as a reason to cut taxes again. Soon you end up like the clusterfuck in Kansas. It is zealotry, uninformed by real world evidence. They talk about the Laffer curve, but pretend there isn't a left hand side of it.
Arthur Laffer himself was an economic adviser to Kansas. Strangely, he still has influence.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
Absolutely correct as usual Big G.
People like @MaxPB and Philip Thompson live in a fantasy world and don't understand that wealthy people such as they need to contribute to Society rather than just being focused on their own pockets.
I who am noted for being moderate and centre on here am proud to confirm that in my last 10 years of working I paid (approx) £1m tax and NI. It showed that I paid my way as well as being massively successful. 👍
My net rate of tax was 42% last year. Get off your high horse, you're not the only person with an annual six figure tax bill and I'll be paying it for many more years than you did.
My own situation isn't relevant, my issue is working people on modest incomes being forced to pay when there's rich pensioners who can easily be taxed at source for significantly more than they pay now and have their state pension tapered down to zero from £50k+
Well done you managed a post without swearing at me.
If you are in the 42% tax band you are no where near paying £100,000 tax a year.
I was a regular visitor to the AR band even in the good old days when it was 50%. So 52% technically on your basis.
If you ever get to earning more than £100k a year you will enjoy the 60%/effective 62% band. Probably 63% by then
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
And of course even if we cut taxes and the economy did grow faster, the deficit would still be wider overall and they would use the situation as a reason to cut taxes again. Soon you end up like the clusterfuck in Kansas. It is zealotry, uninformed by real world evidence. They talk about the Laffer curve, but pretend there isn't a left hand side of it.
Ah the fabled Laffer curve - a curve with no formula, no coordinates, no data - about as real as a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
You are begging the question by adding "consequent spending cuts". It is possible lower tax rates will allow higher spending if the economy grows (or if the Laffer curve people are right). They might grow the economy by permitting higher productive investment or just higher private spending.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
Exactly, home owning over 65s are the Tories core vote and those in the 45-65 bracket who own property and are waiting for an inheritance are who won the Tories the last general election.
Even in 2019 Labour won under 44s so they can largely be ignored as far as the Tories are concerned, most of the under 40s are not voting Tory
Gives me a convenient opportunity to post this graphic from 2019, showing the results of research into where the two main parties derive their support:
As you say, the Tory core vote is (1) old people, who are also largely homeowners, and (2) middle class, middle aged or near pensionable people, who are mostly homeowners or mortgage payers, and a great many of whom are also expectant heirs.
Based on this, there are three things that a Johnson (i.e. populist) Tory Government ought not to do:
*Make pensioners pay for anything *Try to put new taxes on property *Raise inheritance tax
If they do actually elect to deprive oldies of the bumper state pension rise they have coming next Spring then it will be a very brave decision - in the Sir Humphrey sense of the word.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
And of course even if we cut taxes and the economy did grow faster, the deficit would still be wider overall and they would use the situation as a reason to cut taxes again. Soon you end up like the clusterfuck in Kansas. It is zealotry, uninformed by real world evidence. They talk about the Laffer curve, but pretend there isn't a left hand side of it.
Ah the fabled Laffer curve - a curve with no formula, no coordinates, no data - about as real as a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end.
That's like saying the Bell curve isn't real because there's no formula etc
Of course the curve is real, and of course you can be on the left hand side of it. There's no inevitability of being on the right hand side.
I just happen to believe that a 75% real marginal tax rate on income is on the left hand side of it.
Kaivan Shroff @KaivanShroff · Sep 2 But for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton would have become the first female president of the United States – and none of this would have happened. Instead we got the first president to be impeached twice.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
Exactly, home owning over 65s are the Tories core vote and those in the 45-65 bracket who own property and are waiting for an inheritance are who won the Tories the last general election.
Even in 2019 Labour won under 44s so they can largely be ignored as far as the Tories are concerned, most of the under 40s are not voting Tory
Gives me a convenient opportunity to post this graphic from 2019, showing the results of research into where the two main parties derive their support:
As you say, the Tory core vote is (1) old people, who are also largely homeowners, and (2) middle class, middle aged or near pensionable people, who are mostly homeowners or mortgage payers, and a great many of whom are also expectant heirs.
Based on this, there are three things that a Johnson (i.e. populist) Tory Government ought not to do:
*Make pensioners pay for anything *Try to put new taxes on property *Raise inheritance tax
If they do actually elect to deprive oldies of the bumper state pension rise they have coming next Spring then it will be a very brave decision - in the Sir Humphrey sense of the word.
And the correct one (I am a pensioner so would be affected)
So younger people who have been shafted by pensioners over Brexit and then shafted over covid to protect the same pensioners are now expected to stump up an NI rise to allow the same group to pay fuck all towards the increased social care costs .
They should means test pensioners and stick a tax rise on those who can afford it .
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
Low taxes and grow the economy. We should be set for an economic boom now which will transform the budget for the better anyway. Strangling that at birth with taxes is idiotic.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
"Low taxes and grow the economy" sounds great but how exactly do you think low taxes (and presumably the consequent public spending cuts) will grow the economy?
You are begging the question by adding "consequent spending cuts". It is possible lower tax rates will allow higher spending if the economy grows (or if the Laffer curve people are right). They might grow the economy by permitting higher productive investment or just higher private spending.
You say "if the economy grows", I am asking how do lower taxes grow the economy?
Tax isn't lost to the economy, it's spent and recycled.
Real Tories all coming out against the idiot NI rise. Boris has lost it, Rishi needs to push back and axe it completely now. Press the advantage.
As I understand it Rishi wanted a higher increase
No, Rishi wanted no tax rise, Boris and Sajid wanted 2% on employees and 2% on employers, he forced them down to 1% on each. If he pushes again now he can get rid of it completely.
Rishi is in the right. We need to pay down the debt, not leave it for future generations to pay off. Anti-tax zealotry is out of control on the backbenches.
Since when is this proposed tax rise going to pay down the debt?! It's tax and spend, the state is deciding to take a larger proportion of the economy leaving less for everyone else. The solution is and has always been to grow the bloody economy. The tax burden is already too high.
With the best will in the world tax rises are coming no matter who is HMG
This specific tax is to fund social care. Tax the people who use it. Pensioners can afford the tax, working people can't. Raising £20bn from over 65s would be easy and it's not as though they can easily leave the country to a lower tax jurisdiction. Again, 16% of pensioners are in the higher tax bracket. They pay at least £3000 less in tax than someone who works and they receive at least £9k in benefits. That 16% can cover the whole £20bn and more. It's time to make taxes fair.
Trouble is that wealthy retired people are the core demographic for Johnson's Conservatives (and to be fair, they always have been in modern times). And less wealthy but comfortable retired homeowners in the north are the next ones on Johnson's list. That's where his majority is from.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
Exactly, home owning over 65s are the Tories core vote and those in the 45-65 bracket who own property and are waiting for an inheritance are who won the Tories the last general election.
Even in 2019 Labour won under 44s so they can largely be ignored as far as the Tories are concerned, most of the under 40s are not voting Tory
Gives me a convenient opportunity to post this graphic from 2019, showing the results of research into where the two main parties derive their support:
As you say, the Tory core vote is (1) old people, who are also largely homeowners, and (2) middle class, middle aged or near pensionable people, who are mostly homeowners or mortgage payers, and a great many of whom are also expectant heirs.
Based on this, there are three things that a Johnson (i.e. populist) Tory Government ought not to do:
*Make pensioners pay for anything *Try to put new taxes on property *Raise inheritance tax
If they do actually elect to deprive oldies of the bumper state pension rise they have coming next Spring then it will be a very brave decision - in the Sir Humphrey sense of the word.
Its worth noting that research is from when Theresa May was in charge and matches the 2017 election, which is why the Tories lost their majority.
In the 2019 election the Tory/Labour crossover age dropped down to 39, which accounted for the Tory landslide majority.
Taking a dump on working voters will take us back to the dark days of Theresa May.
Comments
Not convinced Starmer is that someone. He seems a very cautious type to me.
A 1% NI increase while retaining the triple lock would be unacceptable as would keeping the exemption for working pensioners from the charge
I have consistently opposed the triple lock for months and I would benefit from it
A wealth tax is always labour's go to cure but any wealth tax would need to be well thought through
Interesting times
Neil Henderson
@hendopolis
·
4m
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Tories at war over ‘idiotic’ tax increase #TomorrowsPapersToday
If you're going to announce you're breaking your manifesto pledges, you better make it look like a last resort, which is what it does look like.
What I found particularly distasteful was a group of Orthodox Jews who seemed to treat their visit as something of a pilgrimage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election#/media/File:UK_opinion_polling_2010-2015.png
I think it was a few weeks ago the Guardian had an interview where Starmer said he was going to 'paint his vision in primary colours'.
So far however, it has felt more like watching paint dry.
EDIT: Same answer applies to Benpointer just above.
What a shame.
It will be interesting how this plays out
Last I heard he was touring the country listening to voters.
There's a hell of a lot riding on the leaders speech this year.
In fact, other than Prescott punching that bloke, and Hague saying he would save the (unthreatened) pound, I can't recall any of it.
What you probably want nearer the election is a combination of selected practical solutions to pressing problems, allied to one or two proposals to address Labour's weaknesses with the electorate. Something like:
*A long-term funding fix for health and social care, paid for by tax hikes aimed at above-average earners and wealthier pensioners
*A boost in funding for scientific research, perhaps allied to a Government-backed investment scheme for tech start-ups
*Guarantee the 0.7% target for aid spending, but also introduce a 2.5% or 3% floor for defence spending alongside it
*Ambitious targets for building renewable electricity generation capacity, with a timetable for the phasing out of gas fired power stations (going further and faster than has already been proposed by the Government)
*A new plan for increasing the supply of housing, to stabilise prices and therefore improve affordability
The final suggestion is going to mean making it harder for Nimbies to keep blocking smaller scale residential developments, but it may also need fresh thinking on larger scale supply. To avoid sprawl everywhere, I'd be in favour of targeting three or four existing cities, down South where the pressure is most acute - say Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury and possibly Winchester - and making them all very much larger. Tens of thousands of new homes, with infrastructure like extra hospital and school capacity, zones for business development and public transport networks all planned and built alongside or in advance of the accommodation.
This is not the immediate story to be fair, the controversy on vaccines for 12 - 15 will dominate all the headlines next week
I expect the four chief scientific advisors will overrule the JCVI
Ivermectin: Oklahoma doctor warns against using unproven Covid drug
BBC news
The house thing should be first. Maybe go massively bold and "A home for everyone". If that means councils building like it is 1950s then so be it.
It was the biggest single news story since World War 2. Arguably, in its coverage, scale and viscerality, for TV purposes, it was - and remains - the biggest single news story EVER
I recall it distinctly, all-too-distinctly. I've told the story but I will tell it again
I was in my flat in Store Street Bloomsbury. For some reason I had the TV on news, around 1pm, as I went out for lunch. I came back with a sandwich and saw a plane hit one of the twin towers. I thought at first it was an advert for a disaster movie, but then they kept replaying it, and I realised: OMG this has just happened, a terrible, Wagnerian ACCIDENT
Of course by then I was glued. I kept watching. And then I saw - live on British TV - another plane hit the other tower. For about 30 seconds it did not compute. I thought they had somehow re-enacted a new angle on the first plane, even though it looked so different. Then I realised, fuck, they have hit both towers, this is an appalling terror attack (a thought which had already been dormant but growing)
I watched for 20 minutes, horrified but compelled. Then I realised, Shit, my flatmate, I must tell her. So I ran upstairs and she was in her room knitting and doing crosswords (she didn't do much) and I yelled Turn on the TV! -so she did and she watched it and took it in and nodded, awkwardly, and.... then she turned the TV off and went back to her knitting.
She just did not want to know. Total denial. She could not cope. One of the most impressive displays of ostrich-head-in-sand I have ever seen. She is a bit of an idiot, bless her
For the rest of the day I watched all the coverage, then I went out for food and every TV in every bar and cafe and TV shop was showing endless Twin Tower news, and in the end I could not do it alone so I rang a friend and he agreed he was equally scared and we went to a pub and just silently watched it on the Pub TV, getting slowly drunk, along with many others who clearly felt the same. I had to be with people
An awful, awful day
Unfortunately, the PM got away with talking only about the spending bit.
While Labour burbled on about the tax bit.
Is it called something like 108 mins?
That evening towers of light shone into the night sky which could be seen all over the city, again very moving. Spent the night in a quiet bar that I was the only tourist in at the time and memories of the day was pretty much the only thing anyone was talking about.
We all knew it wouldn’t be the same again.
Peculiarly, though, I reckon we were wrong.
The regulations governing mass housebuilding are going to need to be carefully considered and put in place by a competent secretary of state or else we'll end up in even worse trouble than we are already. The construction of horrible little shoebox flats and rabbit hutch houses, without any associated infrastructure being put in place and sometimes shoddily constructed to boot, needs to stop.
It's about time we abolish the state pension to pay for social care. If you're 60+ and haven't saved enough to retire then it's no one's fault but your own, especially in today's pension opt-out world.
At least with Corbyn I'd have got a few more bank holidays.
Funnily enough, I was also genuinely spooked by the SARS outbreak. But then as I got older, I started to think these things get overhyped. And then COVID came along.
Anyone else in the great Conservative tradition is like the wife who has been dumped for a fruiter model.
Except there's no alimony this time.
We already know from the Dementia Tax debacle the extent and volume of howling to be expected the nanosecond that anyone proposes that the retired be made to stump up for anything, even if it's only the better-off ones. Certainly it'll take about five seconds for Age UK and other elderly lobbies to start painting pictures of frail, vulnerable little old ladies being forced to decide whether to use a fan heater to keep warm or a ring on the hob to cook their dinner - or, for that matter, whether to buy food for the cat or food for themselves. It's going to take a lot of sticking power to see off that sort of pleading.
All that came after, Afghanistan (an actual reaction) to Iraq, to the Crash, has only speeded that relative decline
It was a monumental inflection point. America was at the peak of post-communist imperial swagger, the USA was the unchallenged Hegemon, the mono-power. Supreme. China was an intriguing joke on a distant horizon. Then two planes hit two towers, and it all changed
Historians will date all 21st century things from that day
People like @MaxPB and Philip Thompson live in a fantasy world and don't understand that wealthy people such as they need to contribute to Society rather than just being focused on their own pockets.
I who am noted for being moderate and centre on here am proud to confirm that in my last 10 years of working I paid (approx) £1m tax and NI. It showed that I paid my way as well as being massively successful. 👍
I genuinely struggle to understand why you are so vehement about not wanting to pay a penny more in tax.
It's like when the Lib Dems dumped their opposition to tuition fees. You piss on your supporters at your peril.
ETA but maybe that is what happens to memorials with the passage of time. Do we think badly of tourists visiting the Vietnam war memorial? Or Trafalgar Square?
My own situation isn't relevant, my issue is working people on modest incomes being forced to pay when there's rich pensioners who can easily be taxed at source for significantly more than they pay now and have their state pension tapered down to zero from £50k+
I was meaning on a more personal level. People continued to fly. Live and work in tall buildings. Cities, particularly the centres continued their rapid growth. There was no war with conscription. No economic shockwave.
For the vast majority life continued as if nowt had happened.
Even in 2019 Labour won under 44s so they can largely be ignored as far as the Tories are concerned, most of the under 40s are not voting Tory
The government's underlying problem is that it won by persuading people that a wall of money could be released by leaving the EU and that no tough financial decisions would be needed on anything because everyone would be a mega winner.
It was always a con, the trouble is that governments can't do the equivalent of running from the restaurant at the moment the waiter realises the credit card is a dud.
Strangely, he still has influence.
If you are in the 42% tax band you are no where near paying £100,000 tax a year.
I was a regular visitor to the AR band even in the good old days when it was 50%. So 52% technically on your basis.
If you ever get to earning more than £100k a year you will enjoy the 60%/effective 62% band. Probably 63% by then
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-47909281
As you say, the Tory core vote is (1) old people, who are also largely homeowners, and (2) middle class, middle aged or near pensionable people, who are mostly homeowners or mortgage payers, and a great many of whom are also expectant heirs.
Based on this, there are three things that a Johnson (i.e. populist) Tory Government ought not to do:
*Make pensioners pay for anything
*Try to put new taxes on property
*Raise inheritance tax
If they do actually elect to deprive oldies of the bumper state pension rise they have coming next Spring then it will be a very brave decision - in the Sir Humphrey sense of the word.
Of course the curve is real, and of course you can be on the left hand side of it. There's no inevitability of being on the right hand side.
I just happen to believe that a 75% real marginal tax rate on income is on the left hand side of it.
Kaivan Shroff
@KaivanShroff
·
Sep 2
But for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton would have become the first female president of the United States – and none of this would have happened. Instead we got the first president to be impeached twice.
They should means test pensioners and stick a tax rise on those who can afford it .
Tax isn't lost to the economy, it's spent and recycled.
In the 2019 election the Tory/Labour crossover age dropped down to 39, which accounted for the Tory landslide majority.
Taking a dump on working voters will take us back to the dark days of Theresa May.