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West Lancs looks like a LAB hold on small turnout – politicalbetting.com

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  • Options
    VerulamiusVerulamius Posts: 1,435
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Hmmmm.

    So - you call up 300,000 men to an operation you claimed was going well but hasn’t finished after eight months, and at a time when people are unhappy with you.

    You have a severely weakened officer corps due to the high attrition rate.

    You give these people weapons, if you have them.

    And tell them to point their weapons at the Ukrainians.

    It’s an old strategy. It worked really well for, say, Nicholas II.

    Ah.

    And call them up to the capital city military depots...

    A relevant thread.

    A communist steeped in the history of the revolution would be unlikely to make this mistake.


    https://mobile.twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1572270599535214598
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    Indeed, more bordellos might encourage economic growth in the sex worker industry. I guess one sector at a time is the way to go.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

  • Options
    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,880

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    We're doing housing too this morning, almost the whole set.

    Just need AV and Indyref2.
  • Options
    darkagedarkage Posts: 4,787
    edited September 2022
    RobD said:

    .

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Milton Keynes?
    I would say that the areas that are closest to my criteria are large parts of Berkshire and Essex, but you could add in some areas of Kent and Surrey. It is essentially much of the London Green Belt.

    It would be quite a spectacle to see the level of total outrage, for which the tories in opposition would be unable to do anything about. In electoral terms, it would surely benefit the labour party in London and the areas that are unaffected by the plan. A 'market led' solution to build 2 million more affordable homes!
  • Options
    Cicero said:

    It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.

    Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.

    This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.

    Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.

    Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
    The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.

    It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
    The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.

    For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.

    Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
    Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
    British?
    Well Waterloo was very much an allied army:
    UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion)
    Hanover: 11,000
    Netherlands: 17,000
    Brunswick: 6,000
    Nassau: 3,000[5]
    Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians

    Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
    Indeed. So two English and one allied victory being crammed into the ‘British’ folder.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503
    Eabhal said:

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    We're doing housing too this morning, almost the whole set.

    Just need AV and Indyref2.
    Can we fit in grammar schools too? And automatic car washes?
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
  • Options
    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    We should be aiming to rebalance the economy. New towns, or heavily refurbished old towns, should be built in order to attract people and companies to regions currently falling behind. Think of it as freeports but with an actual plan.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 24,932
    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    We're doing housing too this morning, almost the whole set.

    Just need AV and Indyref2.
    Can we fit in grammar schools too? And automatic car washes?
    Would be good for the Home Office to have another run at checking the employment status of everyone at manual /hand car wash places...
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,838
    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Hmmmm.

    So - you call up 300,000 men to an operation you claimed was going well but hasn’t finished after eight months, and at a time when people are unhappy with you.

    You have a severely weakened officer corps due to the high attrition rate.

    You give these people weapons, if you have them.

    And tell them to point their weapons at the Ukrainians.

    It’s an old strategy. It worked really well for, say, Nicholas II.

    Ah.

    And call them up to the capital city military depots...

    A relevant thread.

    A communist steeped in the history of the revolution would be unlikely to make this mistake.


    https://mobile.twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1572270599535214598
    He slightly oversimplifies the importance of the conscripts. They didn't cause the revolution, that was a strike followed by a demonstration for International Women's Day, which led to the re-emergence of the Petrograd Soviet.

    What they did do, however, was refuse to obey their very few officers and joined the rioters. At which point the Soviet had 400,000 armed men who would follow their orders.

    That was the game changer that 1905 had lacked.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,624

    You’ve got to feel sorry for those reservists. Absolute cannon fodder. If the professionals couldn’t manage it and morale is already at an all time low, a bunch of reservists isn’t going to improve things.

    He’s really stuck now. Failed on all fronts. Russia looks weak as a result and those countries previously in the soviet orbit know this. How does he avoid looking weak? Hope that most Russians don’t pick up on what’s going on?

    When in doubt throw numbers at the problem and brutalise anyone who protests.

    Sometimes it works.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108
    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,216
    ydoethur said:

    Incidentally, the irony of saying that people in Ukraine do not wish to live under Neo-Nazis and he would support them in their wish was just extraordinary.

    Maybe he reads history - the Nazis pitch in Ukraine was that they were liberators.

    As with the Japanese in Asia, the obsessive compulsive genocide, theft, mass rape kinda put a dampener on that.
  • Options
    Sergei Markov going full Tonto on R4. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so etc.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 24,932

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
  • Options
    bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,821
    On Topic Andy Burnham needs to stand in this seat.

    SKS will not allow him IMO
  • Options
    EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,880
    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    We're doing housing too this morning, almost the whole set.

    Just need AV and Indyref2.
    Can we fit in grammar schools too? And automatic car washes?
    PB post-QEII has been very scattered. Post GE vibe.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560
    eek said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    We're doing housing too this morning, almost the whole set.

    Just need AV and Indyref2.
    Can we fit in grammar schools too? And automatic car washes?
    Would be good for the Home Office to have another run at checking the employment status of everyone at manual /hand car wash places...
    Another...? Have they done it before?

    Tbh though, I would expect most to be fully legit these days, given the prices they charge now.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,624
    edited September 2022
    ydoethur said:

    Incidentally, the irony of saying that people in Ukraine do not wish to live under Neo-Nazis and he would support them in their wish was just extraordinary.

    He seems a little confused as he talks about defending the territorial integrity of Russia, but his own explanation is those areas are not in Russia yet, but can join it if they wish to (and theoretically, ha, could vote not to).

    He does say they are full of oppressed Russians, but territorially they cannot be part of the motherland if he is saying he supports them joining the motherland.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560
    eek said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
    Yebbut, it's not going to stop Barty blaming GB.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    ydoethur said:

    Incidentally, the irony of saying that people in Ukraine do not wish to live under Neo-Nazis and he would support them in their wish was just extraordinary.

    Maybe he reads history - the Nazis pitch in Ukraine was that they were liberators.

    As with the Japanese in Asia, the obsessive compulsive genocide, theft, mass rape kinda put a dampener on that.
    Well, yes, but actually that came slightly later. The actual first thing that turned the Ukrainians against the Nazis was the German decision to seize the collective farms and their produce for themselves rather than sharing out the land to the peasants as they had said they would.

    Even so, some Ukrainians still fought for the Nazis, including Petro Poroshenko's hero Stepan Bandera. There were also significant numbers of Ukrainians active in the Holocaust, mainly as camp guards.

    Not forgetting of course that the Soviets did just the same when they counter-invaded!
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503
    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.



  • Options
    darkagedarkage Posts: 4,787
    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    There wouldn't really be a hit anywhere because the demand in London and the south east is so high, it is constrained by what people can afford, how much money they can borrow etc. And the 'prime' london market is not really affected at all by this.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 91,624
    Nigelb said:

    Russian maths.
    https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1572476671277826051
    Shoigu claims just 5,900+ Russian troops killed. Real number of KIA is certainly much, much higher. Meanwhile he claims 100,000 Ukrainian casualties, including 60,000 KIA — “half the Ukrainian army.”

    It does make it hard to take their threats seriously when every word they say is an obvious lie.

    Why the f*ck would they need to mobilise more people if they've only lost that many troops?

    Doesn't even make sense to someone trying to shill for the regime.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
  • Options

    On Topic Andy Burnham needs to stand in this seat.

    SKS will not allow him IMO

    He legally cannot be Mayor and an MP.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    Indeed, that is a key thread of Barty-pirate economics, along with good and bad deficits and good and bad inflation. I think I have got the hang of it now.
  • Options
    RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,175
    edited September 2022
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.



    All true. That she is mince doesn't bother the cultists. They piled on to her dumb moment commenting on trains to claim that the lack of a true socialist public service means that she has won the argument...
  • Options
    turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 15,116
    Cicero said:

    It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.

    Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.

    This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.

    Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.

    Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
    The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.

    It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
    The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.

    For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.

    Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
    Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
    British?
    Well Waterloo was very much an allied army:
    UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion)
    Hanover: 11,000
    Netherlands: 17,000
    Brunswick: 6,000
    Nassau: 3,000[5]
    Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians

    Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
    Battle of Amiens:

    "The Battle of Amiens, also known as the Third Battle of Picardy (French: 3ème Bataille de Picardie), was the opening phase of the Allied offensive which began on 8 August 1918, later known as the Hundred Days Offensive, that ultimately led to the end of the First World War. Allied forces advanced over 11 kilometres (7 mi) on the first day, one of the greatest advances of the war, with Gen Henry Rawlinson's British Fourth Army (with 9 of its 19 divisions supplied by the fast moving Australian Corps of Lt Gen John Monash and Canadian Corps of Lt Gen Arthur Currie) playing the decisive role."
  • Options
    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503
    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
    I rather like her. Sure some of her politics is naive, wrong-headed or even nasty, but she has a great social media following, possibly the best TikToks of any MP, and speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament, though not on the front-benches.
  • Options

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Inheritance tax is the best tax, since the person being taxed is no worse off afterwards.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040
    edited September 2022

    On Topic Andy Burnham needs to stand in this seat.

    SKS will not allow him IMO

    The problem we have BJO is, yes Starmer is terminally useless, but your plan is to replace him with an even more unelectable Brownite sop from the decade before last.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
    I rather like her. Sure some of her politics is naive, wrong-headed or even nasty, but she has a great social media following, possibly the best TikToks of any MP, and speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament, though not on the front-benches.
    People used to say the same of Rees-Mogg (well, not about the social media accounts).
  • Options

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    The other flaw in the plan is the lack of workers and materials to build them, particularly in the SE.

  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Impeccably behaved, which only seems to enrage the haters all the more...
  • Options
    PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,899
    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Binley and Willenhall that Cov South is losing is slightly Labour but Stoke South which it is gaining is a strong Labour ward. The seat that is giving Stoke up and gaining Binley - Cov NE is safe Labour.
    Cov S will stay Labour.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Make it easier for local councils to build houses and increase the social housing stock.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Inheritance tax is the best tax, since the person being taxed is no worse off afterwards.
    Unless they're living in the benefactor's house, of course.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531
    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
    I rather like her. Sure some of her politics is naive, wrong-headed or even nasty, but she has a great social media following, possibly the best TikToks of any MP, and speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament, though not on the front-benches.
    People used to say the same of Rees-Mogg (well, not about the social media accounts).
    I’m not certain anyone ever said that Rees-Mogg speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
    I rather like her. Sure some of her politics is naive, wrong-headed or even nasty, but she has a great social media following, possibly the best TikToks of any MP, and speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament, though not on the front-benches.
    People used to say the same of Rees-Mogg (well, not about the social media accounts).
    I’m not certain anyone ever said that Rees-Mogg speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament.
    He did.
  • Options

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Make it easier for local councils to build houses and increase the social housing stock.
    There is demand for that, yes, but that doesn't help first time buyers unless the council houses are being built to sell off immediately.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.

    3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.

    1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
  • Options

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    They are all worth exploring imo, and that's the level of debate it's good to have on PB, not 'just build more houses ffs'.
  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503
    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
    To be fair, how many Labour MPs have nice houses in London?

    (Incidentally on that subject, some discussion of Ms Sultana's seat upthread. Under boundary changes a Conservative leaning area is moved into a neighbouring seat and a rock-solid Labour area is added instead. If she loses that, especially given it's almost certain Labour will poll better than last time, she has done *really* well.)
    Just one of several reasons she will not lose the seat.

    1) the vast majority of people vote for party rather than individual

    2) there has been a massive swing to Labour in the polls since GE 2019

    3) the boundary moves favour her as above.

    4) She has charisma and is keeper of the Corbynite flame, so will have oodles of activists campaigning for her.
    Which in its own way is a shame, because

    5) she's a nasty piece of work and a blot on national life. Literally a poor person's Rees-Mogg.
    I rather like her. Sure some of her politics is naive, wrong-headed or even nasty, but she has a great social media following, possibly the best TikToks of any MP, and speaks for a segment of the population that should be heard in Parliament, though not on the front-benches.
    People used to say the same of Rees-Mogg (well, not about the social media accounts).
    Here she is in action. Several million views:

    https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFe7BcQ9/
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    Indeed, that is a key thread of Barty-pirate economics, along with good and bad deficits and good and bad inflation. I think I have got the hang of it now.
    Tory deficit good, Labour deficit bad!

    Tory inflation good, Labour inflation bad!
  • Options
    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    For the Labour party the downside is that the voters in every single seat outside of the cities would take one look and think 'that will be us next'. I am not sure that will help Labour's electoral chances.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040
    edited September 2022

    On Topic Andy Burnham needs to stand in this seat.

    SKS will not allow him IMO

    He legally cannot be Mayor and an MP.
    Besides which, if the answer to Labour's question is Andy Burnham they have no answers.

    We might as well just stick with Liz Truss and borrowing is the new taxation, and see how that runs. In principle I like the idea of taxation being replaced by something else at no expense to services.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Make it easier for local councils to build houses and increase the social housing stock.
    There is demand for that, yes, but that doesn't help first time buyers unless the council houses are being built to sell off immediately.
    Good housing policy should benefit everyone, not just first-time buyers! But first-time buyers will benefit because they’ll have somewhere decent to live until they’ve bought, and they’ll benefit because increasing supply will reduce demand, which will bring down prices.

  • Options
    FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,503

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    Indeed, that is a key thread of Barty-pirate economics, along with good and bad deficits and good and bad inflation. I think I have got the hang of it now.
    Tory deficit good, Labour deficit bad!

    Tory inflation good, Labour inflation bad!
    Four legs good, two legs better!
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    For the Labour party the downside is that the voters in every single seat outside of the cities would take one look and think 'that will be us next'. I am not sure that will help Labour's electoral chances.
    Although again - how many do Labour already hold? Not many, would be my guess. While lots of Labour voters moving in might change the equation.

    That said, I don't know what things are like round your way, but there's a huge amount of building going on round here. In the eight years I've lived here there must have been two thousand new houses just in Cannock itself, not including Rugeley. And they're still going up!

    And the services are not going up to compensate...
  • Options
    turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 15,116

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    Indeed, that is a key thread of Barty-pirate economics, along with good and bad deficits and good and bad inflation. I think I have got the hang of it now.
    Tory deficit good, Labour deficit bad!

    Tory inflation good, Labour inflation bad!
    See also 'No more (Tory) boom and bust".
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531
    ydoethur said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.

    3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.

    1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
    Councils are willing to build houses directly, but current rules make it difficult for them to do so.

  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560
    edited September 2022
    ydoethur said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.

    3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.

    1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
    1. Make it band G too! The day you have outline PP granted on a plot you pay band G until the house is built and sold. Outline PP for 50 houses? That's 50 x band G CT per year until the houses are built, banded and sold.
  • Options
    eekeek Posts: 24,932
    edited September 2022

    On Topic Andy Burnham needs to stand in this seat.

    SKS will not allow him IMO

    He legally cannot be Mayor and an MP.
    He can be Mayor and an MP, what he can't do is be an MP and the local Police Commissioner at the same time (and one responsibility of the Greater Manchester Mayoralty is Police Commissioner)

    Ben Houchen could be both regional mayor and an MP but I suspect he wouldn't want the scrutiny being an MP creates.

  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    ydoethur said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.

    3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.

    1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
    Councils are willing to build houses directly, but current rules make it difficult for them to do so.

    They *say* they are. If they had the opportunity to do so, would they? Remember that almost every council in Britain is currently de facto bankrupt.

    That's one reason why I like 1. It would provide an extra revenue stream for councils, force developers to build up or pay up, and make them think twice about land banking in the first place. It's difficult to think of any actual downside.
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,918
    edited September 2022

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Start charging them Council tax on each plot 9 months after planning permission has been granted. They will soon find new impetus to start using their land bank.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Start charging them Council tax on each plot 9 months after planning permission has been granted. They will soon find new impetus to start using their land bank.
    Make it six months on any multi house development and I reckon we'd soon have more houses!
  • Options

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
  • Options
    FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,045
    Call me superficial but it's interesting that only The Express and The Guardian have gone with flattering pictures of Truss.
  • Options
    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
  • Options
    stjohnstjohn Posts: 1,777

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    I am familiar with this argument but there is an aspect of it that I don't get. I can see how it would benefit owners of plots of land with planning permission to act collectively and agree not to develop their plots, in order to restrict overall supply and so increase the value of all their collective assets. But does it advantage an individual landowner to do this? Shouldn't they just crack on and realise the value of their asset? Especially if they are concerned that the housing market may have peaked? Or does the argument go that most plots of land with planning permission are owned by a few large organisations who act as a kind of cartel? If this is the argument, is it true?

  • Options
    ydoethur said:

    darkage said:

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.

    No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
    For the Labour party the downside is that the voters in every single seat outside of the cities would take one look and think 'that will be us next'. I am not sure that will help Labour's electoral chances.
    Although again - how many do Labour already hold? Not many, would be my guess. While lots of Labour voters moving in might change the equation.

    That said, I don't know what things are like round your way, but there's a huge amount of building going on round here. In the eight years I've lived here there must have been two thousand new houses just in Cannock itself, not including Rugeley. And they're still going up!

    And the services are not going up to compensate...
    Yep. One of the reasons I moved out of Newark was the plan to double the size of the town in 20 years but without dealing with the issues of services and transport.
  • Options
    BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,560
    Even with our differences, the country would definitely be better run if PB.com were the government.

    Much better ideas emerge here than from HMG. Much more common sense in evidence.
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    I think you’ll find that we Brexited. What happens to the Euro is nothing to do with us. What happens to the £ is.
  • Options
    FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,045

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
  • Options
    Apols in advance for the parochialism but this is pretty funny. Apart from anything else the SCons thinking that someone working for Jim 'Astonished By How Easy It's Been To Outwit The SNP' Murphy was a plus is a cracker.




  • Options
    stjohn said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    I am familiar with this argument but there is an aspect of it that I don't get. I can see how it would benefit owners of plots of land with planning permission to act collectively and agree not to develop their plots, in order to restrict overall supply and so increase the value of all their collective assets. But does it advantage an individual landowner to do this? Shouldn't they just crack on and realise the value of their asset? Especially if they are concerned that the housing market may have peaked? Or does the argument go that most plots of land with planning permission are owned by a few large organisations who act as a kind of cartel? If this is the argument, is it true?

    Yes. It is a very valid complain from smalling building firms that as land become available as part of Local Plans it is bought up by one of the few large developers who then sit on it for years. There are currently 600,000 plots in England which have had planning permission for more than 2 years and on which there is no current start date for development. At the same time the developers are pushing for changes in the planning regulations which they blame for the lack of building.
  • Options

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
  • Options

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    I think you’ll find that we Brexited. What happens to the Euro is nothing to do with us. What happens to the £ is.
    They are both suffering from a strong dollar with the same problems
  • Options
    CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,152
    Sandpit said:

    Someone trying to attract top financial services talent from the EU and US, rather than driven by the politics of envy. Should raise a few billion in income tax.
    From 7 months ago - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/16/weve-had-a-run-on-champagne-biggest-uk-banker-bonuses-since-financial-crash

    Is this sector really the priority right now?
  • Options
    FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,045

    stjohn said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    I am familiar with this argument but there is an aspect of it that I don't get. I can see how it would benefit owners of plots of land with planning permission to act collectively and agree not to develop their plots, in order to restrict overall supply and so increase the value of all their collective assets. But does it advantage an individual landowner to do this? Shouldn't they just crack on and realise the value of their asset? Especially if they are concerned that the housing market may have peaked? Or does the argument go that most plots of land with planning permission are owned by a few large organisations who act as a kind of cartel? If this is the argument, is it true?

    Yes. It is a very valid complain from smalling building firms that as land become available as part of Local Plans it is bought up by one of the few large developers who then sit on it for years. There are currently 600,000 plots in England which have had planning permission for more than 2 years and on which there is no current start date for development. At the same time the developers are pushing for changes in the planning regulations which they blame for the lack of building.
    If you get planning permission and don't build anything I reckon that is a good argument for compulsory purchase.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108
    stjohn said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    I am familiar with this argument but there is an aspect of it that I don't get. I can see how it would benefit owners of plots of land with planning permission to act collectively and agree not to develop their plots, in order to restrict overall supply and so increase the value of all their collective assets. But does it advantage an individual landowner to do this? Shouldn't they just crack on and realise the value of their asset? Especially if they are concerned that the housing market may have peaked? Or does the argument go that most plots of land with planning permission are owned by a few large organisations who act as a kind of cartel? If this is the argument, is it true?

    The latter. Land is bought by developers, who get planning permission and then sit on it for years.

    The developers say this isn't true.

    Councils say it is.

    Who's right? Who knows. Both sides put out ridiculous figures to support their case that bear no relationship to each other and probably to reality.

    I suspect probably it does happen on a smaller scale than proposed, with much the impact when it does happen as stated.
  • Options

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
    As is the euro - this is dollar strength
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,079

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
    And there was that "look at me" hat.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    FTFY.

    Fwiw, I agree. I don't see that Meghan has done anything wrong in the last fortnight. She's had the sense to keep quiet, at least in public.
  • Options

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.

    The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,336
    ydoethur said:

    ...

    Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand

    I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses

    How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?

    It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
    Well, here's some ideas:

    1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots.
    2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year.
    3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.

    I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
    2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.

    3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.

    1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
    Agreed, council tax on undeveloped plots after the first twelve months would be an excellent incentive, raise a fair amount of revenue, and have fairly limited negative effects.

  • Options
    squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,328
    edited September 2022
    class="Quote" rel="Ratters">In a different fiscal situation, I don't mind the choice of Truss' tax cuts:

    - NI is a tax on jobs and should never have been increased. Income tax was the way to do that if it needed to be done.
    - Stamp duty is a tax on mobility and is at a level that definitely impacts behaviour negatively. Replacing with property taxes that are more incremental would be better.
    - I have less sympathy with cancelling the corporation tax rise, as evidence has shown tax deductions for investments made is a better incentive than cutting the headline rate.

    The trouble is we have a huge deficit, a massive rise in spending, increasing cost of debt and a plummeting pound.

    This is fantasy economics that is going to end in disaster.

    Fair enough.

    I can see the sense in replacing stamp duty with property taxes… but of course Truss isn’t proposing replacing her stamp duty cut with anything other than borrowing.


    Reply

    We are already screwed for property tax .
    It's called council tax .........
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531
    edited September 2022

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    I think you’ll find that we Brexited. What happens to the Euro is nothing to do with us. What happens to the £ is.
    They are both suffering from a strong dollar with the same problems
    So, if the $ is strong, what can we do to support the £? Is the answer, “Increase the deficit and fund tax cuts through borrowing”?
  • Options

    Even with our differences, the country would definitely be better run if PB.com were the government.

    Much better ideas emerge here than from HMG. Much more common sense in evidence.

    It's a low bar, but yes.
  • Options
    CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,152

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
    Beyond tedious. As far as I could see, she was scarcely visible but her behaviour was impeccable. It is not easy supporting a grieving husband at such a time and she is also separated from her very young children. Whatever criticisms might be made of her - or anyone else - over other matters, all the RF deserve to be cut some slack right now. Let them grieve in peace and privacy.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    Indeed, that is a key thread of Barty-pirate economics, along with good and bad deficits and good and bad inflation. I think I have got the hang of it now.
    Tory deficit good, Labour deficit bad!

    Tory inflation good, Labour inflation bad!
    See you've got the hang of it too. Barty-pirate economics has some quite simple easy to follow principles.
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,079
    edited September 2022

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
    Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
  • Options
    Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 60,247
    edited September 2022

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    I think you’ll find that we Brexited. What happens to the Euro is nothing to do with us. What happens to the £ is.
    They are both suffering from a strong dollar with the same problems
    So, if the $ is strong, what can we do to support the £? Is the answer, “Increase the deficit and fund tax cuts through borrowing?”
    That is the present political divide in the country and how this evolves over the next 2 years will determine who forms the next government in 2024
  • Options
    bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,531

    Scott_xP said:

    Trussonomics in a single tweet

    Pound slumps to fresh 37-year low as cost of servicing government debt hits August record
    http://news.sky.com/story/pound-slumps-to-fresh-37-year-low-as-cost-of-servicing-government-debt-hits-august-record-12702313

    Have you seen the euro just now
    I think you’ll find that we Brexited. What happens to the Euro is nothing to do with us. What happens to the £ is.
    They are both suffering from a strong dollar with the same problems
    So, if the $ is strong, what can we do to support the £? Is the answer, “Increase the deficit and fund tax cuts through borrowing?”
    That is the present political divide in the country and how this evolves over the next 2 years will determine who forms the nest government in 2024
    Sure. But I was curious as to your answer…?
  • Options
    MattWMattW Posts: 18,382
    eek said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
    That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
    On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.

    On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.

    His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.

    Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.

    In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
  • Options

    class="Quote" rel="Ratters">In a different fiscal situation, I don't mind the choice of Truss' tax cuts:

    - NI is a tax on jobs and should never have been increased. Income tax was the way to do that if it needed to be done.
    - Stamp duty is a tax on mobility and is at a level that definitely impacts behaviour negatively. Replacing with property taxes that are more incremental would be better.
    - I have less sympathy with cancelling the corporation tax rise, as evidence has shown tax deductions for investments made is a better incentive than cutting the headline rate.

    The trouble is we have a huge deficit, a massive rise in spending, increasing cost of debt and a plummeting pound.

    This is fantasy economics that is going to end in disaster.

    Fair enough.

    I can see the sense in replacing stamp duty with property taxes… but of course Truss isn’t proposing replacing her stamp duty cut with anything other than borrowing.


    Reply

    We are already screwed for property tax .
    It's called council tax .........

    It can be simultaneously true that a tax is a bad tax and that it shouldn't, in isolation, be cut. What we need is a root and branch reform of the tax system. What we are getting instead is cuts to some tax rates that don't address the fundamental problems, will exacerbate both consumer and asset price inflation, and put the public finances at risk.
  • Options
    MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 25,040

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
    I didn't like that she cried at the funeral. Very disrespectful!
  • Options

    class="Quote" rel="Ratters">In a different fiscal situation, I don't mind the choice of Truss' tax cuts:

    - NI is a tax on jobs and should never have been increased. Income tax was the way to do that if it needed to be done.
    - Stamp duty is a tax on mobility and is at a level that definitely impacts behaviour negatively. Replacing with property taxes that are more incremental would be better.
    - I have less sympathy with cancelling the corporation tax rise, as evidence has shown tax deductions for investments made is a better incentive than cutting the headline rate.

    The trouble is we have a huge deficit, a massive rise in spending, increasing cost of debt and a plummeting pound.

    This is fantasy economics that is going to end in disaster.

    Fair enough.

    I can see the sense in replacing stamp duty with property taxes… but of course Truss isn’t proposing replacing her stamp duty cut with anything other than borrowing.
    Reply

    We are already screwed for property tax .
    It's called council tax .........

    It can be simultaneously true that a tax is a bad tax and that it shouldn't, in isolation, be cut. What we need is a root and branch reform of the tax system. What we are getting instead is cuts to some tax rates that don't address the fundamental problems, will exacerbate both consumer and asset price inflation, and put the public finances at risk.

    Not sure what happened with block quotes above BTW. My post starts "It can be".
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,838

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Justin Trudeau was aggressively heckled by an anti lockdown protestor while leaving his London hotel after the funeral

    https://twitter.com/TrueNorthCentre/status/1572217218934644737?s=20&t=J4fgK4Tn5r7tL_tEFVx4jw

    Good to see that freedom of speech is still alive and well!

    As opposed to the Free Speech Union, who have just had their payment service cancelled with no warning by PayPal.
    Did they give a reason?

    We will hear the usual chuntering from the likes of @Foxy and @SouthamObserver about how there is no obligation for a private company to provide services… I think there should be a universal service obligation on payment services (not borrowing)… financial services are and should be a utility

    The usual ‘terms of service’ bollocks, with no real explanation and no way of speaking to a human. Maybe they just don’t like Unions?

    Yes, many of these modern payment services are behaving as activists, policing who can use their platform in a way that stifles freedom of speech. Ironic, that the Free Speech Union gets told to shut up.
  • Options

    Andy_JS said:

    Indefensible.

    "Truss admits her tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the rich"

    https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-prepared-to-be-unpopular-with-tax-policy-to-boost-economic-growth-12702039

    Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.

    Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
    Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.

    Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.

    Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.

    Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
    One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.

    What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?

    Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
    There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.

    There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.

    If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
    Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.

    Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.

    I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.

    As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.

    We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
  • Options
    kinabalu said:

    Foxy said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Zara Sultana MP

    My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭

    Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄

    LNER
    Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign
    I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron



    https://twitter.com/LNER/status/1572313997931585538

    Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
    I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
    I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.

    It's not because she's a woman.
    Its not because she is British Asian.
    Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
    Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
    Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
    Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
    I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.

    A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
    What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
    Presumably they breathed funny or something.
    I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
    And there was that "look at me" hat.
    I am not a fan of Meghan and think both she and Harry have been foolish over the last few years. But as someone pointed out to me yesterday, she has just done one of the toughest things she will ever have to do.

    I am sure she was saddened by the Queen's death, if only for Harry (and I think more than that). She has had every camera in the place trained on here by people just waiting for her to give the slightest indication of a smile or the slightest deviation from 'proper' mourning.

    In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.

    That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
  • Options
    BREAKING. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s response to the address by Putin:

    “Putin’s breaking of his own promises not to mobilise parts of his population and the illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, are an admission that his invasion is failing. Ukraine is winning this war.”


    https://twitter.com/antoguerrera/status/1572496712165474305
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,108

    Even with our differences, the country would definitely be better run if PB.com were the government.

    Much better ideas emerge here than from HMG. Much more common sense in evidence.

    It's a low bar, but yes.
    https://youtu.be/HEvjsjvXQM4

    Start twelve minutes in...
  • Options
    LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 15,072
    edited September 2022

    Cicero said:

    It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.

    Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.

    This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.

    Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.

    Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
    The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.

    It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
    The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.

    For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.

    Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
    Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
    British?
    Well Waterloo was very much an allied army:
    UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion)
    Hanover: 11,000
    Netherlands: 17,000
    Brunswick: 6,000
    Nassau: 3,000[5]
    Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians

    Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
    Indeed. So two English and one allied victory being crammed into the ‘British’ folder.
    I'm willing to claim Bannockburn as a great British victory on the same basis. Your victories are our victories. Anything that makes Scotland strong, makes Britain strong.
This discussion has been closed.