Just looking at those Russian referendum results. The official invented turnouts were around 30k, in regions with populations of 1-2 million*. They are just imbeciles in every respect.
*Except Luhansk, where the 'turnout' was reported as greater than the population.
It has become an article of faith among the MAGA crowd that Biden destroyed the pipeline.
Just want to make sure everyone understands that Republicans are now *trying to start WWIII* to own the libs, falsely accusing their own country of terrorism to try to justify a Russian attack on America, NATO, or Ukraine’s nuclear facilities whose fallout could trigger Article 5 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1575282878560276480
Must have missed when Radek Sikorski, Polish MEP put on his MAGA hat.
It's not exclusive to the MAGA crowd. Sikorski is a bit of a loose cannon.
"Tory MPs may be penning new letters of no confidence in Liz Truss but, as we report on @TheNewsDesk tonight, there's a little known 1922 Committee rule (confirmed by Sir Graham Brady) that a new leader can't be challenged during their first 12 months. So she's safe for a year."
Quite right too, a new leader ought to be able to have time to front-load unpopular decisions and get their job done.
She needs an election then, so we can all have our say as to whether she has the mandate to take the sort of decisions she is taken
I’d agree with you had we’d just come out of a general election and she had won a stonking majority. She may be acting like it..
To be fair to May she did ask for just that and held a (poor as it turned out) General Election. One of the reasons I voted for her in that one was I thought coming out and asking for a mandate, putting it to the British people to bolster her negotiating position was (abstractly) the right thing to do.
To be "fair" to May, she was 20%+ ahead in the polls when she called the election, and was looking at a pretty much guaranteed mandate, a big majority and a couple of extra years till the next election.
She wasn't wrong either, as the local elections a couple of weeks into the campaign had the Tories 11% ahead of Labour. I suspect no-one around her thought she had even the slightest chance of losing when they called the election.
Nor when they started spouting election-loosing policies.
Conservative PMs do have an unenviable track record of surrounding themselves with weapons-grade pillocks....
O/T for Dura Ace - my sister just sent me this that they drove past. Almost as expensive a crash as Liz has caused.
Ummph. Looks messy. Do you know roughly where it was? Can see what looks like a largeish bay in the background.
I know exactly where it is - it’s where a dual carriageway ends in a filter in turn so guessing either the Honda Jazz (likely their fault as Honda Jazz drivers are evil) has misjudged their filtering and caught the back of the Ferrari or the Ferrari driver has tried to jump ahead of the jazz, rather than die of old age driving behind it, and got clipped.
Enzo has savage power delivery from that NA V12 that hits hard at the top end of the rev range. Combine that with early noughties state-of-the-art stability control (that can be completely disabled) and you've got a handful unless you've got Jamie Chadwick levels of car control.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
Thousands of resentful, often drunk, unfit, untrained men who know they are meat for the meat grinder will surrender in droves, melt away, be slaughtered at a high rate, kill their officers etc. etc.
Of course. But it also, sometimes, works, as Russians know from their cruel history
Throw a nearly-infinite number of men at a battle against a superior enemy and it can be won. Along with General Winter, it is Russia's secret weapon. Their tolerance of vast suffering. Putin is gambling that this still exists
Nonsense. General Winter will favour Ukraine as Russian equipment is crap. Ukrainians will not stop killing the Russian soldiers because they feel sorry for them. Blast a trench containing 20 soldiers or blast it when it contains 100 - they will still all be killed. Ukraine will need help in housing the prisoners though!
The motivation might be different, but the effect is the same. The falling pound makes British assets cheaper for Americans to take over. Then any profits will be remitted back across the Atlantic, our deficit will get worse, and our economy will shrink.
The accusation was specific to trashing the pound so the NHS can be sold off. It’s bonkers.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
So I only just had it this summer after 3 jabs - the illness itself was a bad flu, I was bedbound for a few days with a high temp, and didn't actually have much in the way of bad lung stuff.
Problem I have now is, a few months after that, I'm still exhausted, I'm having headaches and brainfog, I'm getting muscle aches and chest pain all the time. I used to walk home most days from the office, about 4.5 miles in about an hour depending on weather and if I popped into the shops. I can't do half of that atm without breaking into flopsweats and wheezing.
Even if you think it's fine for people to get sick and die - the long term impact of this won't go away. My doc is assuming it's long covid, but I'm going to go for tests, impacting an already crippled healthcare system. I can't work as efficiently as I have been, my quality of life has dramatically reduced - hell I'm finding doing 30 mins - 1 hour of housework hard. And I'm in my early 30s. We have no idea how long these symptoms will last, or if we can treat them. That's a strain on our healthcare system, a strain on our labour productivity, a strain on society.
And if we keep letting wave after wave hit the populace, the chance people have of getting ill and staying ill gets closer to 1. A nation enfeebled by this is a pretty significant threat, in my view.
I'm sorry you're not feeling good, and hope you're feeling better soon.
Please take what follows as honest discord and not a belittlement of how you're feeling, but with all respect I'm sorry to say that shit happens, viruses exist, and we need to get used to it.
If the healthcare system is crippled, then people will die. If people die, then they come off waiting lists and stop needing pensions, or care, or ... eventually a new equilibrium is found.
Its horrible, and its unpleasant, but its also true. What is the alternative? How do we prevent a rampant virus from spreading? The virus can not be contained or controlled, its hubris to suggest it can be, unless we lockdown for about six months to remove and permanently seal up the borders, permanently prevent international trade and permanently prevent international travel.
Realistically, post-vaccines is as good as it gets.
We can reduce the spread of viruses and other pathogens, and routinely do so. We eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, and are making good progress against polio. We contained SARS and MERS. We work every year to minimise the impact of flu, through vaccinations, through behaviour and through reducing infection in animal populations. We work every year to minimise the impact of HIV/AIDS, through behaviour, testing and contact tracing.
Likewise, there is plenty we can do to reduce COVID-19 cases: good air filtration in buildings, encouraging those with symptoms to not go into work and to wear masks, vaccination campaigns. These methods are effective and they are cost effective. But libertarians like to pretend we’re impotent because they are so allergic* to any form of collective action. Bart’s “let them die in the streets” is perhaps at the extreme end of that…
You're right we do vaccinate against the flu. And I'm all for vaccines for Covid.
I've had 3 vaccines, I doubt I'll have any more but if offered more I would do my bit and get a jab. My grandparents that are still alive have had five vaccines each.
So yes, vaccinated for Covid, like we vaccinate against the flu. Great. But no to masks, or lockdowns, or restrictions or staying at home when you're healthy but a carrier or any other nonsense.
Just looking at those Russian referendum results. The official invented turnouts were around 30k, in regions with populations of 1-2 million*. They are just imbeciles in every respect.
*Except Luhansk, where the 'turnout' was reported as greater than the population.
It has become an article of faith among the MAGA crowd that Biden destroyed the pipeline.
Just want to make sure everyone understands that Republicans are now *trying to start WWIII* to own the libs, falsely accusing their own country of terrorism to try to justify a Russian attack on America, NATO, or Ukraine’s nuclear facilities whose fallout could trigger Article 5 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1575282878560276480
They are even madder than out home-grown Brexiteers. I personally think there should be an sanity check limitation to universal suffrage.
It should be something like: Do you 1) believe in alien abduction or the Lizard people 2) Of the opinion that the moon landings were faked 3) Believe that Britain "got its sovereignty back" after Brexit.
If yes to any of these absurdities then such voters are limited to only voting for Town Councillors in Epping.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The 1922 Committee encouraged members to vote early, possibly because they feared a postal strike, and also because they offered members the facility to change their votes online (an offer later withdrawn).
So a lot of votes would have been cast before members had a chance to watch the hustings, even if they'd been so inclined.
That does not explain her 12 years on complete non-achievement and frequent gaffes before she put herself up for leadership. Enough of us here commented on it. If we could see the problems, MPs and members should have been even more aware of it. After all, the MPs had met her at work. How long does it take you to determine that someone is utterly stupid?
Also after this disaster i think the conservatives will regret boasting how diverse their cabinet is
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
So I only just had it this summer after 3 jabs - the illness itself was a bad flu, I was bedbound for a few days with a high temp, and didn't actually have much in the way of bad lung stuff.
Problem I have now is, a few months after that, I'm still exhausted, I'm having headaches and brainfog, I'm getting muscle aches and chest pain all the time. I used to walk home most days from the office, about 4.5 miles in about an hour depending on weather and if I popped into the shops. I can't do half of that atm without breaking into flopsweats and wheezing.
Even if you think it's fine for people to get sick and die - the long term impact of this won't go away. My doc is assuming it's long covid, but I'm going to go for tests, impacting an already crippled healthcare system. I can't work as efficiently as I have been, my quality of life has dramatically reduced - hell I'm finding doing 30 mins - 1 hour of housework hard. And I'm in my early 30s. We have no idea how long these symptoms will last, or if we can treat them. That's a strain on our healthcare system, a strain on our labour productivity, a strain on society.
And if we keep letting wave after wave hit the populace, the chance people have of getting ill and staying ill gets closer to 1. A nation enfeebled by this is a pretty significant threat, in my view.
I'm sorry you're not feeling good, and hope you're feeling better soon.
Please take what follows as honest discord and not a belittlement of how you're feeling, but with all respect I'm sorry to say that shit happens, viruses exist, and we need to get used to it.
If the healthcare system is crippled, then people will die. If people die, then they come off waiting lists and stop needing pensions, or care, or ... eventually a new equilibrium is found.
Its horrible, and its unpleasant, but its also true. What is the alternative? How do we prevent a rampant virus from spreading? The virus can not be contained or controlled, its hubris to suggest it can be, unless we lockdown for about six months to remove and permanently seal up the borders, permanently prevent international trade and permanently prevent international travel.
Realistically, post-vaccines is as good as it gets.
My position is not that we need permanent lockdown - but there are so many things that we dropped that the government could have pushed as a new normal. Masking, testing, clear outlines for sick leave were all dropped so that Johnson could claim that "Covid was over". There is a middle group between "let it rip, let people die" and "house arrest".
And whilst I did share my position in part to highlight the personal impact of the illness - the systemic impact is bigger. Why are unions so strong atm? Because the labour market everywhere is highly inflexible because there are not a huge number of workers floating in the market looking for jobs because 1) lots of people died or are permanently disabled and 2) lots of people now have long term illnesses that mean they are less productive, and some jobs that previously took 1 person now might take 1.5 people. Why is the NHS in freefall? Because more people are ill, more people are long term ill and there are fewer nurses and doctors, partly due to long term systemic issues and immigration, but also because lots of medical workers have had to throw in the towel or had breakdowns because of workload over covid.
Your position of "meh, people will die and get sick, what can we do, what hubris it is to expect humans to be able to deal with such a force of nature" is antithetical to a functioning society. Everything we do is hubris against the forces of nature, that is modern humanity. A lot of that has really bad consequences *coughclimatechangecough* but also a lot of it is something to aspire to - technology and culture that enriches our existence beyond measure.
There was a middle road not taken - a state led acceptance of reasonable adjustment to a new normal: masks, testing, work from home where possible, etc. that was just abandoned to "do what you think is best". I still wear my mask on public transport and in heavy crowds, but it doesn't matter because you need a certain % of the population to do that for it to work. And that could have easily been kept alive if government wanted to. But they didn't, and now the false equivalence rules...
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Not to forget that Sunak was leading the polls of Tory members for years, until his disastrous NI tax raid. After that people went against Sunak.
It was policies, not skin colour, that decided the last leadership election.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Plenty of tories do think like that i trust you out in the provinces
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
The Ukrainians have been sending thousands of soldiers to Britain to be trained properly. Russia is mobilising reservists, telling them to buy their own first aid kits and other essential equipment, and driving them straight to the front. The mobilisation is looking to be even less effective then anyone imagined.
Putin has already lost. When he realises that he will know that using nukes isn't going to help him hold on in the Kremlin.
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
Ed Davey must be excited about being the official Leader of the Opposition after the election.
Sir Ed v Sir Keir, sounds very Game of Thrones.
If there was to be a non Tory leader of the Opposition to a Starmer government it would be led by Farage not Davey, if the Tories completely collapsed Canada 1993 style and were replaced by RefUK
You will know more than I do how many seats the LD’s are second to the Tories in so I am possibly wrong but surely if the Tories haemorrhage votes a lot will go to the Lib Dems as things stand (West Country, Winchester type seats).
If there is a Farage party up and running ahead of the next election they will indeed attract a lump of Tory votes but of the Tory vote gets split three ways (Farage, Tory hold-outs and LD) then the Tories will be wiped and Faragists unlikely to pick up many seats at the election.
Added to those seats that will go from Tory to Labour I can easily see a way for Ed Davey to be next leader of the opposition.
No, if the Tory vote collapsed completely ie to about 10% most of that would go to Farage as in the European elections who would then win most of the remaining Tory safe seats while Labour picked up most of the marginals. Even if the LDs picked up a few Tory home counties seats
I know this is completely academic as the Tories won't go down to 10% (I know European elections, but people protest there, not so a GE), but if the Tories did go to 10% I disagree with your prediction (although my views are entirely a gut reaction so I accept I might be entirely wrong). I would predict that if the Tories were on 10% (and the LDs on a decent percentage) the LDs would sweep much of the South and South West and take a significant number of affluent or rural seats elsewhere (Harrogate, Hereford, etc). I agree there would be a Farage boom turning the remaining previously safe Tory seats which didn't go LD in Kent and Essex and such like into Labour/Farage marginals (Clacton and such like). I also think there would be a lot of Labour/Farage marginals in the Redwall.
So I could see a Labour landslide with a LD opposition and a handful of Farage if the Tories went to 10%. Of course we will never know as I think the Tories have the most stable highest core of all the main parties.
PS actually on re-reading your post I realise I only partly disagree and agree with some of it.
Farage and his parties benefit from PR systems - I don't know how well Reform or any new vehicle would do in FPTP.
This is why I think Tories going down to 15-20% in a GE would probably lead to Lab and LDs gaining almost all, with a Faragist party maybe picking up a handful of seats.
I agree. The premise though was 10%.
But 10% is unlikely - GE squeeze is different to PR squeeze. I think 15-20% is more reasonable.
Lets look at the next election.
Labour need 320+ seats - they used to get 50 in Scotland but are going to get about 4 max .
That means as a Tory voter you have 2 options at the next election - vote Tory for a hung Parliament or lend Labour your vote and ensure they get a decent majority that allows them to do something...
A lot of sane voters are going to be giving SKS the benefit of the doubt because the other option is complete and utter chaos...
Maybe. But if Truss is a short-term aberration and is quickly replaced by somebody like Wallace, who is seen as an entirely pragmatic Tory with no interest in any -ism but in getting the country through the international market traumas, then it depends on what he actually delivers.
If he reinstates Sunak as his Chancellor (perhaps with a quiet private assurance that he really doesn't want to be PM for very long and would happily endorse Rishi as his successor), then it is not so clear cut.
The Doomcasting for the Conservatives is predicated on Truss staying in place to the election. A Wallace-Sunak ticket for 18 months might well shoot most of Labour's foxes.
See Stocky's post of a few minutes ago.
Somehow the 1922 committee needs to manoeuvre things otherwise Truss is safely in place until September next year...
Ed Davey must be excited about being the official Leader of the Opposition after the election.
Sir Ed v Sir Keir, sounds very Game of Thrones.
If there was to be a non Tory leader of the Opposition to a Starmer government it would be led by Farage not Davey, if the Tories completely collapsed Canada 1993 style and were replaced by RefUK
You will know more than I do how many seats the LD’s are second to the Tories in so I am possibly wrong but surely if the Tories haemorrhage votes a lot will go to the Lib Dems as things stand (West Country, Winchester type seats).
If there is a Farage party up and running ahead of the next election they will indeed attract a lump of Tory votes but of the Tory vote gets split three ways (Farage, Tory hold-outs and LD) then the Tories will be wiped and Faragists unlikely to pick up many seats at the election.
Added to those seats that will go from Tory to Labour I can easily see a way for Ed Davey to be next leader of the opposition.
No, if the Tory vote collapsed completely ie to about 10% most of that would go to Farage as in the European elections who would then win most of the remaining Tory safe seats while Labour picked up most of the marginals. Even if the LDs picked up a few Tory home counties seats
I know this is completely academic as the Tories won't go down to 10% (I know European elections, but people protest there, not so a GE), but if the Tories did go to 10% I disagree with your prediction (although my views are entirely a gut reaction so I accept I might be entirely wrong). I would predict that if the Tories were on 10% (and the LDs on a decent percentage) the LDs would sweep much of the South and South West and take a significant number of affluent or rural seats elsewhere (Harrogate, Hereford, etc). I agree there would be a Farage boom turning the remaining previously safe Tory seats which didn't go LD in Kent and Essex and such like into Labour/Farage marginals (Clacton and such like). I also think there would be a lot of Labour/Farage marginals in the Redwall.
So I could see a Labour landslide with a LD opposition and a handful of Farage if the Tories went to 10%. Of course we will never know as I think the Tories have the most stable highest core of all the main parties.
PS actually on re-reading your post I realise I only partly disagree and agree with some of it.
Farage and his parties benefit from PR systems - I don't know how well Reform or any new vehicle would do in FPTP.
This is why I think Tories going down to 15-20% in a GE would probably lead to Lab and LDs gaining almost all, with a Faragist party maybe picking up a handful of seats.
I agree. The premise though was 10%.
But 10% is unlikely - GE squeeze is different to PR squeeze. I think 15-20% is more reasonable.
Lets look at the next election.
Labour need 320+ seats - they used to get 50 in Scotland but are going to get about 4 max .
That means as a Tory voter you have 2 options at the next election - vote Tory for a hung Parliament or lend Labour your vote and ensure they get a decent majority that allows them to do something...
A lot of sane voters are going to be giving SKS the benefit of the doubt because the other option is complete and utter chaos...
Maybe. But if Truss is a short-term aberration and is quickly replaced by somebody like Wallace, who is seen as an entirely pragmatic Tory with no interest in any -ism but in getting the country through the international market traumas, then it depends on what he actually delivers.
If he reinstates Sunak as his Chancellor (perhaps with a quiet private assurance that he really doesn't want to be PM for very long and would happily endorse Rishi as his successor), then it is not so clear cut.
The Doomcasting for the Conservatives is predicated on Truss staying in place to the election. A Wallace-Sunak ticket for 18 months might well shoot most of Labour's foxes.
See Stocky's post of a few minutes ago.
Somehow the 1922 committee needs to manoeuvre things otherwise Truss is safely in place until September next year...
Ed Davey must be excited about being the official Leader of the Opposition after the election.
Sir Ed v Sir Keir, sounds very Game of Thrones.
If there was to be a non Tory leader of the Opposition to a Starmer government it would be led by Farage not Davey, if the Tories completely collapsed Canada 1993 style and were replaced by RefUK
You will know more than I do how many seats the LD’s are second to the Tories in so I am possibly wrong but surely if the Tories haemorrhage votes a lot will go to the Lib Dems as things stand (West Country, Winchester type seats).
If there is a Farage party up and running ahead of the next election they will indeed attract a lump of Tory votes but of the Tory vote gets split three ways (Farage, Tory hold-outs and LD) then the Tories will be wiped and Faragists unlikely to pick up many seats at the election.
Added to those seats that will go from Tory to Labour I can easily see a way for Ed Davey to be next leader of the opposition.
No, if the Tory vote collapsed completely ie to about 10% most of that would go to Farage as in the European elections who would then win most of the remaining Tory safe seats while Labour picked up most of the marginals. Even if the LDs picked up a few Tory home counties seats
I know this is completely academic as the Tories won't go down to 10% (I know European elections, but people protest there, not so a GE), but if the Tories did go to 10% I disagree with your prediction (although my views are entirely a gut reaction so I accept I might be entirely wrong). I would predict that if the Tories were on 10% (and the LDs on a decent percentage) the LDs would sweep much of the South and South West and take a significant number of affluent or rural seats elsewhere (Harrogate, Hereford, etc). I agree there would be a Farage boom turning the remaining previously safe Tory seats which didn't go LD in Kent and Essex and such like into Labour/Farage marginals (Clacton and such like). I also think there would be a lot of Labour/Farage marginals in the Redwall.
So I could see a Labour landslide with a LD opposition and a handful of Farage if the Tories went to 10%. Of course we will never know as I think the Tories have the most stable highest core of all the main parties.
PS actually on re-reading your post I realise I only partly disagree and agree with some of it.
Farage and his parties benefit from PR systems - I don't know how well Reform or any new vehicle would do in FPTP.
This is why I think Tories going down to 15-20% in a GE would probably lead to Lab and LDs gaining almost all, with a Faragist party maybe picking up a handful of seats.
I agree. The premise though was 10%.
But 10% is unlikely - GE squeeze is different to PR squeeze. I think 15-20% is more reasonable.
Lets look at the next election.
Labour need 320+ seats - they used to get 50 in Scotland but are going to get about 4 max .
That means as a Tory voter you have 2 options at the next election - vote Tory for a hung Parliament or lend Labour your vote and ensure they get a decent majority that allows them to do something...
A lot of sane voters are going to be giving SKS the benefit of the doubt because the other option is complete and utter chaos...
Maybe. But if Truss is a short-term aberration and is quickly replaced by somebody like Wallace, who is seen as an entirely pragmatic Tory with no interest in any -ism but in getting the country through the international market traumas, then it depends on what he actually delivers.
If he reinstates Sunak as his Chancellor (perhaps with a quiet private assurance that he really doesn't want to be PM for very long and would happily endorse Rishi as his successor), then it is not so clear cut.
The Doomcasting for the Conservatives is predicated on Truss staying in place to the election. A Wallace-Sunak ticket for 18 months might well shoot most of Labour's foxes.
See Stocky's post of a few minutes ago.
Somehow the 1922 committee needs to manoeuvre things otherwise Truss is safely in place until September next year...
If she loses enough support among the MPs she will go, the details of rules won't matter.
OK - so we are back to a Johnson-era speculation that the 1922 will change the rules on a sitting leader. Possible I grant you but I can't see it myself.
If those who voted Rishi and those who voted Mordaunt put in letters, they would have to change.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
Russia won't declare war (Which I previously thought) - my sources indicate the SMO will change to a counter-terrorist operation (CTO). Which as everyone knows then "allows" circumventing of the Geneva convention.
The declaration of war, or not, is nearly irrelevant at this point
Russian nuclear doctrine allows for the use of nukes if Russia itself is under attack. By Friday, it will be under attack. By Ukraine, using NATO weapons
Putin is taking this to the absolute brink. He’s cornering himself
IMHO we are not likely to see an immediate nuclear escalation by Putin. We are more likely to enter a period of nervous ambiguity whilst Russia works out if the conventional mobilisation is working or not, and the West works out it’s response.
I imagine Putin has a couple of hands to play first. Chief among them an “I am ready to negotiate now”. I think if he is going to do the unthinkable he is going to want to show that it was the unreasonable west that forced him into it.
Yes, he will probably offer peace “on his terms”. Cede these annexed regions of Ukraine to Russia (while muttering quietly about nukes)
That might work. But probably not. Ukraine won’t give up all that territory. Ukraine will fight on - with or without NATO
And that’s when it gets truly dangerous
It wouldn't work. Just demonstrates that nuclear blackmail works and guarantees round 3 at some point.
And as you say, Ukraine will say fuck off anyway. So pour yourself a stiff G&T.
There's a line to be trodden imo between taking the nuclear threat seriously yet not allowing it to deliver any offensive advantage. Its advantage needs to remain defensive only. ie deterrence against (genuine) homeland attack.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
Putin can't win though.
He can kill 500k of his own citizens, mostly drafted from ethnic minorities he's happy to cleanse, but what is he going to arm them with?
Without logistics, he can't win, and his logistics are f***ed while Ukraine has NATO's behind him.
Soldiers win battles, but logistics win wars.
Except that nukes won the Battle of Japan in 1945. Without a single US soldier dying. The only logistics required were two planes and two bombs
The logistical train to build a base on Tinian Island, build B-29s, build atomic bombs and get the fuel and bombs to the island was a vast, vast pyramid.
When Bohr saw the Manhattan Project, he remarked that he had been right when he had suggested that to build an atomic bomb, would require turning a whole country into a factory.
The B29 program was bigger than the Manhattan Project.
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
SNIP
A quote from Cyclefree 5 minutes before your post.. "She planned on making all our pensions insolvent?!?!? Christ ...."
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
If this sort of article gets written once a week, every week, between now and a GE (although in papers other than the Grauniad) - maybe the 10% figure for Tories at the next GE would be plausible:
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
The UK spent hundreds of billions on Covid. A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent, and asked for by the Opposition. Thirty eight billion of tax cuts were already known about by the markets from her leadership election winning platform.
The "surprise" in the 45p announcement was a £2 billion tax cut.
Now I know as Reagan said, a billion here and a billion there and soon we're talking about real money, and I wouldn't sniff at the significance of that, but to suggest that has destroyed the finances of the country is being a tad extreme.
The markets have belatedly reacted to the debt the UK is dealing with, which is predominantly the hundreds of billions from locking down for Covid and for supporting energy prices, not a two billion pound tax cut.
“A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent”
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
SNIP
A quote from Cyclefree 5 minutes before your post.. "She planned on making all our pensions insolvent?!?!? Christ ...."
Our pensions aren't insolvent though. The Bank did its damned job, finally.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The two things are not incompatible. You don't have to believe me, but I know a member who said just that, and voted. Though he used, somewhat inaccurately, the P word.
No doubt there are exist people who might do the same in Labour. And whether it made any difference to the result is deeply questionable.
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
Folks 'na zapade' just refuse to believe that the SMO is as existential for Russia as it is for Ukraine but it is.
I'm a bit of an expert on geopolitics now as our Ukrainians like playing Crusader Kings 3 on the PS5. More accurately they like to watch me play it for their entertainment and criticise all my decisions.
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
Why is that I imagine you are the type of wanker that is very happy for others to experience the "pain and disruption" while you sit back and do fuck all with your life other than be a very poor keyboard warrior?
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
Putin can't win though.
He can kill 500k of his own citizens, mostly drafted from ethnic minorities he's happy to cleanse, but what is he going to arm them with?
Without logistics, he can't win, and his logistics are f***ed while Ukraine has NATO's behind him.
Soldiers win battles, but logistics win wars.
Except that nukes won the Battle of Japan in 1945. Without a single US soldier dying. The only logistics required were two planes and two bombs
The US had already won. The nukes only forced Japan to realise that, and thereby avoided the casualties of an invasion. Russia can't win in Ukraine with nuclear weapons, unless we are intimidated and choose defeat.
If this sort of article gets written once a week, every week, between now and a GE (although in papers other than the Grauniad) - maybe the 10% figure for Tories at the next GE would be plausible:
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
Folks 'na zapade' just refuse to believe that the SMO is as existential for Russia as it is for Ukraine but it is.
I'm a bit of an expert on geopolitics now as our Ukrainians like playing Crusader Kings 3 on the PS5. More accurately they like to watch me play it for their entertainment and criticise all my decisions.
Indeed
And one reason Putin might move faster than expected to save himself:
"The Russian economy will ‘die by winter’ because of the ‘catastrophic consequences’ of the military mobilization, a top Russian economist warns"
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
When I hear lockdown - I think about what Boris Johnson announced in March 2020. So I think we've spent less than 1 year in lockdown... a few months in March 2020, and then again from the Winter of 2020/21, and we were definitely out by July 2021.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Not to forget that Sunak was leading the polls of Tory members for years, until his disastrous NI tax raid. After that people went against Sunak.
It was policies, not skin colour, that decided the last leadership election.
I think that's almost certainly right; though it's not exactly policies. If he had seized the moment and resigned, rather than letting the Boris affair drag on for another two or three months, he would be PM now.
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
The UK spent hundreds of billions on Covid. A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent, and asked for by the Opposition. Thirty eight billion of tax cuts were already known about by the markets from her leadership election winning platform.
The "surprise" in the 45p announcement was a £2 billion tax cut.
Now I know as Reagan said, a billion here and a billion there and soon we're talking about real money, and I wouldn't sniff at the significance of that, but to suggest that has destroyed the finances of the country is being a tad extreme.
The markets have belatedly reacted to the debt the UK is dealing with, which is predominantly the hundreds of billions from locking down for Covid and for supporting energy prices, not a two billion pound tax cut.
“A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent”
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
No, the market was extremely generous to our energy package since it was sold as a "one off". It was not declined. Kwarteng's subsequent SFO was.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
How many Russians actually believe the declaration today means anything ?
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Plenty of tories do think like that i trust you out in the provinces
a) how do you know; and b) no "Tory-inclined acquaintance" (whatever that means) of @Chris said that to him.
If it gets down to around 3-5 or so I'll have to think of hedging... or holding on. I'm ahead if she goes this year. You can back it at 8 (plus whatever boost is, probably 8.5) with Ladbrokes.
In an odd coincidence, I've been reading Kwasi Kwarteng's "Ghosts of Empire" (which is really good, highly recommended). One of the repeated themes is the dangers of handing massive discretionary power to inexperienced, out of touch graduates of grand public schools
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
The Ukrainians have been sending thousands of soldiers to Britain to be trained properly. Russia is mobilising reservists, telling them to buy their own first aid kits and other essential equipment, and driving them straight to the front....
Not even that. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1575405893935665152 The sheer scale of Russian incompetence and disregard for its mobilized civilians. These men complain they were left in the freezing field with no shelter — not even a tent — and no rations for the second day. “Like a flock of sheep.” How many will make it to Ukraine?
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
Indeed.
But hasn't the opposite been shown? That those most in favour of lockdowns - the young, the precarious and the like - also had the worst experience of lockdown. They just understood that the sacrifice was necessary for society to keep functioning. Whereas a lot of the people moaning the most, and demanding people go into the office asap, are rich old guys who do have mansions, and in many cases, have worked from home as journalists for years...
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
So I only just had it this summer after 3 jabs - the illness itself was a bad flu, I was bedbound for a few days with a high temp, and didn't actually have much in the way of bad lung stuff.
Problem I have now is, a few months after that, I'm still exhausted, I'm having headaches and brainfog, I'm getting muscle aches and chest pain all the time. I used to walk home most days from the office, about 4.5 miles in about an hour depending on weather and if I popped into the shops. I can't do half of that atm without breaking into flopsweats and wheezing.
Even if you think it's fine for people to get sick and die - the long term impact of this won't go away. My doc is assuming it's long covid, but I'm going to go for tests, impacting an already crippled healthcare system. I can't work as efficiently as I have been, my quality of life has dramatically reduced - hell I'm finding doing 30 mins - 1 hour of housework hard. And I'm in my early 30s. We have no idea how long these symptoms will last, or if we can treat them. That's a strain on our healthcare system, a strain on our labour productivity, a strain on society.
And if we keep letting wave after wave hit the populace, the chance people have of getting ill and staying ill gets closer to 1. A nation enfeebled by this is a pretty significant threat, in my view.
I'm sorry you're not feeling good, and hope you're feeling better soon.
Please take what follows as honest discord and not a belittlement of how you're feeling, but with all respect I'm sorry to say that shit happens, viruses exist, and we need to get used to it.
If the healthcare system is crippled, then people will die. If people die, then they come off waiting lists and stop needing pensions, or care, or ... eventually a new equilibrium is found.
Its horrible, and its unpleasant, but its also true. What is the alternative? How do we prevent a rampant virus from spreading? The virus can not be contained or controlled, its hubris to suggest it can be, unless we lockdown for about six months to remove and permanently seal up the borders, permanently prevent international trade and permanently prevent international travel.
Realistically, post-vaccines is as good as it gets.
We can reduce the spread of viruses and other pathogens, and routinely do so. We eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, and are making good progress against polio. We contained SARS and MERS. We work every year to minimise the impact of flu, through vaccinations, through behaviour and through reducing infection in animal populations. We work every year to minimise the impact of HIV/AIDS, through behaviour, testing and contact tracing.
Likewise, there is plenty we can do to reduce COVID-19 cases: good air filtration in buildings, encouraging those with symptoms to not go into work and to wear masks, vaccination campaigns. These methods are effective and they are cost effective. But libertarians like to pretend we’re impotent because they are so allergic* to any form of collective action. Bart’s “let them die in the streets” is perhaps at the extreme end of that…
You're right we do vaccinate against the flu. And I'm all for vaccines for Covid.
I've had 3 vaccines, I doubt I'll have any more but if offered more I would do my bit and get a jab. My grandparents that are still alive have had five vaccines each.
So yes, vaccinated for Covid, like we vaccinate against the flu. Great. But no to masks, or lockdowns, or restrictions or staying at home when you're healthy but a carrier or any other nonsense.
You response seems minimally connected to what I wrote. I didn’t mention a single restriction or lockdowns.
We have public health information campaigns to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet. What’s wrong with having public health information campaigns to encourage people to wear a mask and not go into work when they have symptoms of a respiratory infection?
We have sewerage systems to provide clean water (with the occasional outpouring of poo onto beaches under the Conservatives). What’s wrong with having air filtration systems in buildings to provide clean air?
You appear to be ideologically opposed to the mere idea that we can do something about COVID. We have to be impotent to justify your libertarianism, just as others on the right argue that the economy is in such a mess that we are impotent to the markets rather than admit that Truss/Kwarteng got it wrong, just as others on the right argue that there’s nothing we can do to stop Putin, so let’s make Ukraine sue for peace.
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
50% drop in house prices = GFC mark 2, not just a bit of pain and disruption.
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
Folks 'na zapade' just refuse to believe that the SMO is as existential for Russia as it is for Ukraine but it is.
I'm a bit of an expert on geopolitics now as our Ukrainians like playing Crusader Kings 3 on the PS5. More accurately they like to watch me play it for their entertainment and criticise all my decisions.
Nope, it is existential for Putin and his henchmen. They are not the living embodiment of Russia, anymore than Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage is the living embodiment of England. How are your Ukraine war predictions going by the way? I get the sense they are about as reliable as Kwasi Kwarteng's economics or Liz Truss's presentation skills.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
But it wasn't a single tax cut. It's the principle of tax cuts and "further tax cuts", as the government added on the weekend, being described as a "permanent cost", and an unquantified or unquantifiable one against the backdrop of high borriowing, by key and respected organisations like the IFS. They then described the outlook as "unsustainable" because the OBR wasn't allowed to.That's what caused the market reaction.
The Law Society @TheLawSociety · 1h “If solicitors do not get parity on the bare minimum 15% recommended by Lord Bellamy, the Ministry of Justice will have made it clear that there is no future in criminal defence practice and
*we will advise our members not to undertake this work*" 6/7
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The two things are not incompatible. You don't have to believe me, but I know a member who said just that, and voted. Though he used, somewhat inaccurately, the P word.
No doubt there are exist people who might do the same in Labour. And whether it made any difference to the result is deeply questionable.
Of course. And of course. I don't deny bigots in the Conservative party. And Labour as you point out also.
If you know a member who said that then you need to revise your social or political circle.
As for @Chris - I objected to it because it was a nasty cheap shot that he made up because no one in all seriousness, if they had spent a moment in Chris' company, would have said such a thing to him.
If it gets down to around 3-5 or so I'll have to think of hedging... or holding on. I'm ahead if she goes this year. You can back it at 8 (plus whatever boost is, probably 8.5) with Ladbrokes.
8.0 for Truss to go this year is completely bonkers and a massive lay. It ain't happening.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
No, Bart, not the point. It was as if he stood up and said wibble repeatedly for half an hour: costs nothing at all but that is not the point. It was his fundamental unseriousness, was the problem.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
C'mon, can't we have at least one day on here without softhead cliche mongering?
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
I suppose another option is 3. tactical nuke use forces West to lean on Ukraine to cease hostilities (or it capitulates itself), Russia becomes international pariah, sanctions max, nuclear genie out of the bottle meaning world becomes a much more dangerous place.
I have a feeling we are however headed for a variation of 2.
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
50% drop in house prices = GFC mark 2, not just a bit of pain and disruption.
Oh well.
Controlled burn-backs are better at preventing rampaging forest fires, but if you don't have them and allow the undergrowth never to be removed then the problems build up until a rampaging forest fire becomes necessary and unpreventable. We're possibly at that point now.
Had we had brief periods of negative equity repeatedly in the past thirty years, then we'd now be in a position where prices were reasonable, as they'd bounced up and down. Unfortunately we've taken a toxic attitude that prices must never fall and they've ratchetted higher and higher to the point it will take a 50% fall to get back to reasonable levels.
Smaller falls more often would have been better, than a major fall at once.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
How many Russians actually believe the declaration today means anything ?
Enough people at the top of Russia know exactly what it means, and the legal and political consequences. This is now a war for Russian territory and to protect Russian people, this is a war Russia absolutely must not and cannot lose, and cannot walk away from (unless brutally defeated - but then: nukes)
As for ordinary Russians, have their opinions ever really counted? But I think you'd be surprised how many still support the war. Indeed as it gets more serious that support might actually grow, as the war becomes existential for everyone. I am reminded of this now prophetic piece which appeared in the Spectator, months ago:
"Mikhail looked my way and laughed. Like I had a point, but it was beyond the wit of man to make it better. Ludmila was now gazing at the empty vodka bottle disconsolately. The mountain air was still and warm. Mikhail disappeared, then somehow returned with another vodka bottle.
"‘This one is really homemade,’ he said, chuckling. With refilled glasses, we toasted each other, we toasted peace, and we watched the stars glittering over Nakhchivan, the hostile Azeri exclave. Then Mikhail said: ‘You know, I hate the war, but we have to win it. I am scared that Putin will order a mobilisation, but if he does, I will fight. Russia is my country. Russia must win the war.’"
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
When I hear lockdown - I think about what Boris Johnson announced in March 2020. So I think we've spent less than 1 year in lockdown... a few months in March 2020, and then again from the Winter of 2020/21, and we were definitely out by July 2021.
I've been going to watch Exeter Chiefs for years. (I haven't.)
Doesn't mean I was sitting in the stadium for two years solid.
It is an ongoing, pervasive, pernicious state of mind that went on for years. Whether the government was at any particular time telling us who we could have in our own houses or not.
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
The UK spent hundreds of billions on Covid. A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent, and asked for by the Opposition. Thirty eight billion of tax cuts were already known about by the markets from her leadership election winning platform.
The "surprise" in the 45p announcement was a £2 billion tax cut.
Now I know as Reagan said, a billion here and a billion there and soon we're talking about real money, and I wouldn't sniff at the significance of that, but to suggest that has destroyed the finances of the country is being a tad extreme.
The markets have belatedly reacted to the debt the UK is dealing with, which is predominantly the hundreds of billions from locking down for Covid and for supporting energy prices, not a two billion pound tax cut.
“A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent”
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
No, the market was extremely generous to our energy package since it was sold as a "one off". It was not declined. Kwarteng's subsequent SFO was.
Once again the mini budget featured 2 items - Energy price support that the market supported.
A whole pack of tax cuts that the market didn't support.
@MoonRabbit I pointed this out to you yesterday yet today you are still spurting the same insane rubbish...
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
So I only just had it this summer after 3 jabs - the illness itself was a bad flu, I was bedbound for a few days with a high temp, and didn't actually have much in the way of bad lung stuff.
Problem I have now is, a few months after that, I'm still exhausted, I'm having headaches and brainfog, I'm getting muscle aches and chest pain all the time. I used to walk home most days from the office, about 4.5 miles in about an hour depending on weather and if I popped into the shops. I can't do half of that atm without breaking into flopsweats and wheezing.
Even if you think it's fine for people to get sick and die - the long term impact of this won't go away. My doc is assuming it's long covid, but I'm going to go for tests, impacting an already crippled healthcare system. I can't work as efficiently as I have been, my quality of life has dramatically reduced - hell I'm finding doing 30 mins - 1 hour of housework hard. And I'm in my early 30s. We have no idea how long these symptoms will last, or if we can treat them. That's a strain on our healthcare system, a strain on our labour productivity, a strain on society.
And if we keep letting wave after wave hit the populace, the chance people have of getting ill and staying ill gets closer to 1. A nation enfeebled by this is a pretty significant threat, in my view.
You'll get there but you just have to give it time. I'm 36. I was in the first round for long Covid before long Covid was even a thing. It was terrifying because no-one knew at all how this weird disease was going to play out. I was researching the SARS virus and survivors and it really shook me up. I thought I was done.
I believe long Covid is to do with the immune system being in overdrive. You've got to calm it all down and it takes time. Increasing your stress and anxiety only makes it worse.
Eat well, sleep plenty, meditate, try cold showers and incrementally up the exercise. Give yourself a mental break to convalesce, take time doing things you enjoy and you'll be OK. Eventually your life might have more meaning because you will appreciate your health so much more.
The above is good advice. I'd add, if you've had a blood test, get your GP to go through all your vitamin and mineral levels with you. Some may need a boost, through diet or supplementation. If you haven't had one, request one.
Mr. Pulpstar, my instinct is to agree... but we do live in volatile times and Truss has not been so much a suicide bomber to Conservative hopes as a thermonuclear detonation.
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
50% drop in house prices = GFC mark 2, not just a bit of pain and disruption.
Oh well.
Controlled burn-backs are better at preventing rampaging forest fires, but if you don't have them and allow the undergrowth never to be removed then the problems build up until a rampaging forest fire becomes necessary and unpreventable. We're possibly at that point now.
Had we had brief periods of negative equity repeatedly in the past thirty years, then we'd now be in a position where prices were reasonable, as they'd bounced up and down. Unfortunately we've taken a toxic attitude that prices must never fall and they've ratchetted higher and higher to the point it will take a 50% fall to get back to reasonable levels.
Smaller falls more often would have been better, than a major fall at once.
I imagine that even if they do fall it might still be difficult to get a mortgage when your only occupation that you can declare is "amateur keyboard warrior -unpaid"
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
That is an interesting and persuasive analysis. A Russian military collapse could end up being very rapid though and not under the control of anyone. The shockwaves and political changes within Russia could also be pretty rapid...
Except:
“Vladimir Putin has told aides that a staggering half a million Russian losses would be “acceptable” if it enables him to dismember Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The same source suggests he is ready to mobilise two million or more reservists out of a potential pool of 25 million - much larger than the initial 300,000 suggested.”
Putin has to win. And will do almost anything to win
The Ukrainians have been sending thousands of soldiers to Britain to be trained properly. Russia is mobilising reservists, telling them to buy their own first aid kits and other essential equipment, and driving them straight to the front....
Not even that. https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1575405893935665152 The sheer scale of Russian incompetence and disregard for its mobilized civilians. These men complain they were left in the freezing field with no shelter — not even a tent — and no rations for the second day. “Like a flock of sheep.” How many will make it to Ukraine?
It occurs to me that we need to help Ukraine deal with the logistics of humungous mass surrender.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
Indeed.
But hasn't the opposite been shown? That those most in favour of lockdowns - the young, the precarious and the like - also had the worst experience of lockdown. They just understood that the sacrifice was necessary for society to keep functioning. Whereas a lot of the people moaning the most, and demanding people go into the office asap, are rich old guys who do have mansions, and in many cases, have worked from home as journalists for years...
I don't know I haven't read the breakdowns. I would be amazed (but then PB knowledge is amazing) if the young were in favour of lockdowns when as far as I can tell they almost continuously ignored them throughout the years they were in operation. Or is it one of those survey answer questions to "would you like world peace" or "should there be higher taxes".
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
If you believe in your statement "... the market being illogical." You have a much worse understanding of economics than you make out.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
It's a bluff.
We are calling his bluff. Hopefully the Chinese and others will also let him know it's not on. Then he folds.
If he tries to bolster his bluff with a demonstration strike with a tactical nuke I'm confident the NATO response will be robust enough that he'll fold at that point. It's even possible that NATO intelligence will be good enough that they'll act pre-emptively.
We're not backing down.
A much greater risk is that the Russians take out the Norwegian gas pipelines. That's the level of terrorist action that they are capable of.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Plenty of tories do think like that i trust you out in the provinces
a) how do you know; and b) no "Tory-inclined acquaintance" (whatever that means) of @Chris said that to him.
Kemi Badenoch’s popularity with the membership seems to suggest that the problem wasn’t skin colour.
Among the Tory members I know, the issue with Sunak was the non-dom thing and it’s wider ramifications - the sense that he is semi detached from the U.K.
We have public health information campaigns to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet. What’s wrong with having public health information campaigns to encourage people to wear a mask and not go into work when they have symptoms of a respiratory infection?
We have sewerage systems to provide clean water (with the occasional outpouring of poo onto beaches under the Conservatives). What’s wrong with having air filtration systems in buildings to provide clean air?
I agree with you on the public information campaign, but I'm sorry to have to inform you that raw sewage poured on to beaches and into rivers under Labour too. Panorama did an exposé in 2009:
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
C'mon, can't we have at least one day on here without softhead cliche mongering?
Thats the US. We may catch it, yes. The global economy is on the verge of collapsing
22.5% drop? That seems to be volume, not prices.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
50% drop in house prices = GFC mark 2, not just a bit of pain and disruption.
Oh well.
Controlled burn-backs are better at preventing rampaging forest fires, but if you don't have them and allow the undergrowth never to be removed then the problems build up until a rampaging forest fire becomes necessary and unpreventable. We're possibly at that point now.
Had we had brief periods of negative equity repeatedly in the past thirty years, then we'd now be in a position where prices were reasonable, as they'd bounced up and down. Unfortunately we've taken a toxic attitude that prices must never fall and they've ratchetted higher and higher to the point it will take a 50% fall to get back to reasonable levels.
Smaller falls more often would have been better, than a major fall at once.
I imagine that even if they do fall it might still be difficult to get a mortgage when your only occupation that you can declare is "amateur keyboard warrior -unpaid"
I find it amusing that you're so invested in my work life balance. I've only been on the site for a few minutes today while I have my lunch, and made fewer posts than many others, but you've still got your hard on for me since I was OK with Brexit and rejected your Europhilia.
Its rather cute you keep trying to make things personal like that, I think you secretly enjoy having people to argue with and maybe just get frustrated that you can't match my intellect or arguments so you just turn personal instead, its a bit like a young boy tugging on a girls pigtails because they like them.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one - and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
The striking thing about the 'discovery' that Liz Truss is both 'properly bonkers' (as Dominic Cummings put it) and an absolutely abysmal media performer is that it's not a discovery at all. Even if you weren't paying attention before the leadership campaign started, her performance in the campaign, complete with gaffes and screeching U-turns, was plentiful evidence of exactly how bad her premiership would be. It's baffling that Tory party members didn't notice, given all the hustings and the TV debates with Sunak.
The membership polls had Truss top or thereabout for a long period but what is unclear is how much the anti-Sunak sentiment was a factor. He did better than expected but there was undoubtedly an "anyone but Sunak" faction. The reason for this seemed to be that they disliked his fiscal profligacy ......
Let's be honest, though. No doubt a fair few disliked the colour of his skin. I was assured by a Tory-inclined acquaintance that he was just "too dark".
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. No one and certainly not a "Tory-inclined acquaintance" of yours - said to you that Sunak's skin was too dark. Plenty to attack the Cons about but they have just had one of the most diverse leadership contests in British history.
Plenty of tories do think like that i trust you out in the provinces
a) how do you know; and b) no "Tory-inclined acquaintance" (whatever that means) of @Chris said that to him.
Kemi Badenoch’s popularity with the membership seems to suggest that the problem wasn’t skin colour.
Among the Tory members I know, the issue with Sunak was the non-dom thing and it’s wider ramifications - the sense that he is semi detached from the U.K.
Kemi comes across as 100% British, by comparison.
I don't dispute that there are bigots in the Cons part as there are in the nation as a whole but given the nature of the leadership contest to suggest, as @Chris did so very casually, that it was Rishi's skin colour that was to blame for him losing it I'm afraid I'm not having at all.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
Perfectly logical to sell gilts and the pound if you conclude the PM and Chancellor are clueless numpties.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
I agree markets can be illogical. That’s why I favour strong regulation of the markets. What’s odd is you saying the markets are illogical when you want to leave everything up to the markets!
However, in this case, I think the markets saw a plan to massively increase borrowing to fund both specific spending (including energy support) and to support large tax cuts in order to, supposedly, create growth and they thought, “That’s bollocks. That won’t create growth. Kwarteng’s got it wrong, UK borrowing will go up way more than we’d previously expected, sell £s.”
This wasn’t about “a further £2 billion tax cut”. There was plenty more in the (non)budget that went beyond the previously announced reversal of Sunak’s increases. The market reacted to the (non)budget and the market said, “This is a stupid budget.” Pretending that the market just happened to react at that point to some earlier event is what’s absurd.
We are navel gazing. The Trussterfuck is bad and quite big, but this is dimensionally worse
Because it cements escalation in place. Putin is annexing a vast chunk of Ukraine (half of it he doesn’t even occupy). No way Kyiv can accept this, and Putin knows it
Kyiv will now be fighting “in Russia”. That legally allows Putin to threaten and use nukes. But it doesn’t just allow this, he will be obliged to wield nukes as otherwise he is just “letting Russia be attacked” and he will be toppled and a proper dictator will take over, who will actually defend Mother Russia. With nukes
I’m afraid to say all signs point to the use of nuclear weapons. Or something horribly close
It doesn't 'legally' allow him to do anything, since it's illegal.
He's probably mad enough to use at nuke, but all the signs are this is just another exercise in trying to scare rather than a direct prelude or preparation to use them. So in that sense no different for what he's been doing for months.
I've been mulling over this. It feels like time is our friend here.
The biggest risk is if things unfold very quickly, Putin panics / goes mad / makes one last throw of the dice and then things escalate into global nuclear conflict.
The longer the mobilisation goes on, with Ukraine continuing to take chunks of territory back and Russian citizens gradually becoming more disillusioned, the less momentum and less immediate casus belli there is for Putin to escalate to nuclear, and the less likelihood his leadership will go along with it.
We need the Ukraine war to go out not with a bang but a whimper. Incremental gains along with ongoing attritional Russian losses are probably a lot safer than a whirlwind rout with Ukraine marching on Sebastopol by Christmas.
Any defeat is the end of Putin. Even more so now he has incorporated half of Ukraine into Russia. If he loses now he is losing a large chunk of Russia. That is intolerable. Not just for him but maybe for any future leader
This annexation makes serious escalation all-but-inevitable. And it is designed that way
Saddam survived losing the Gulf War. I think the fact that Putin will start to worry about his grip on power will make him more likely to walk away from Ukraine without using nukes, because he'll have more immediate threats to concentrate on.
If Putin is minded to "walk away from Ukraine" why the hell has he just formally annexed a quarter of Ukraine and turned it into "Russia"?
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be . 1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
How many Russians actually believe the declaration today means anything ?
Millions. Putin and the SMO have a constituency in Russia.
The Law Society @TheLawSociety · 1h “If solicitors do not get parity on the bare minimum 15% recommended by Lord Bellamy, the Ministry of Justice will have made it clear that there is no future in criminal defence practice and
*we will advise our members not to undertake this work*" 6/7
Time for some lunch! In the event that I am not abducted by aliens who wish to have sex with me and there is no nuclear holocaust or Chinese invasion, I will see you all later!!
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
The UK spent hundreds of billions on Covid. A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent, and asked for by the Opposition. Thirty eight billion of tax cuts were already known about by the markets from her leadership election winning platform.
The "surprise" in the 45p announcement was a £2 billion tax cut.
Now I know as Reagan said, a billion here and a billion there and soon we're talking about real money, and I wouldn't sniff at the significance of that, but to suggest that has destroyed the finances of the country is being a tad extreme.
The markets have belatedly reacted to the debt the UK is dealing with, which is predominantly the hundreds of billions from locking down for Covid and for supporting energy prices, not a two billion pound tax cut.
“A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent”
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
No, the market was extremely generous to our energy package since it was sold as a "one off". It was not declined. Kwarteng's subsequent SFO was.
No you are wrong. Central to this is the size of support on the energy bills, it dwarfs everything else, and that is the item in the trolley which got the card declined.
You should know this as much as I know this, because you can actually listen to what the IMF and the markets are saying like I am listening to what they are actually saying.
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
Folks 'na zapade' just refuse to believe that the SMO is as existential for Russia as it is for Ukraine but it is.
I'm a bit of an expert on geopolitics now as our Ukrainians like playing Crusader Kings 3 on the PS5. More accurately they like to watch me play it for their entertainment and criticise all my decisions.
Nope, it is existential for Putin and his henchmen. They are not the living embodiment of Russia, anymore than Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage is the living embodiment of England. How are your Ukraine war predictions going by the way? I get the sense they are about as reliable as Kwasi Kwarteng's economics or Liz Truss's presentation skills.
The predictions were made on the basis of
- what happened in 2014. Nearly all the experts expected a repeat. Until “I need weapons not a ride out of town”… - the only previous defeat of an armoured invasion force by anti-tank missiles I can think of is Chad vs Libya. All other wars have shown antitank missiles to be nasty but not war winning.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
If you believe in your statement "... the market being illogical." You have a much worse understanding of economics than you make out.
The market is frequently illogical and tends to have a herd mentality in short term periods. People buying because others are buying, or selling because others are selling, can cause irrational behaviour in the short term.
Its just like the petrol forecourts running out of petrol last year, not because there was any serious disruption to supplies, but instead because a couple of forecourts ran out while switching from 5% to 10% biofuel unleaded and this got misreported and led to a stampede at the forecourts, which led to us having a nationwide fuel shortage for no good reason.
Its important to differentiate between the short term and long term, irrational behaviour always exists and identifying it is important.
Just thinking, has a UK government ever imploded so spectacularly? In the space of a year they’ve gone from looking set for another landslide to looking finished. And it’s almost all self-inflicted. Ditch the man who won them the last election because for all his ‘charisma’ he couldn’t tell the truth or govern competently and was crapping all over standards in public life, replace him with a lightweight who their MPs didn’t want and whose politics and personality have no popular appeal. Wham bam, thank you Tories, I say, with my Labour partisan hat on. I can’t pretend not to be pleased at the political ramifications. But taking that hat off for a second, it’s something of a tragedy. The country is being let down very badly by the Conservative party.
Some of it is self inflicted but the covid recession and the war have been extreme head winds that would have been challenging for any government.
You don't need to use the subjunctive. The Covid recession and the war *is* challenging for many governments. Most have not reacted in a way that deliberately shafts the finances of their country though.
How exactly has Truss "deliberately shafted" the finances of the country.
The UK spent hundreds of billions on Covid. A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent, and asked for by the Opposition. Thirty eight billion of tax cuts were already known about by the markets from her leadership election winning platform.
The "surprise" in the 45p announcement was a £2 billion tax cut.
Now I know as Reagan said, a billion here and a billion there and soon we're talking about real money, and I wouldn't sniff at the significance of that, but to suggest that has destroyed the finances of the country is being a tad extreme.
The markets have belatedly reacted to the debt the UK is dealing with, which is predominantly the hundreds of billions from locking down for Covid and for supporting energy prices, not a two billion pound tax cut.
“A hundred and fifty billion was pencilled in for Energy Price Support without a murmur of dissent”
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
No, the market was extremely generous to our energy package since it was sold as a "one off". It was not declined. Kwarteng's subsequent SFO was.
Once again the mini budget featured 2 items - Energy price support that the market supported.
A whole pack of tax cuts that the market didn't support.
@MoonRabbit I pointed this out to you yesterday yet today you are still spurting the same insane rubbish...
You and Pulpstar seem to be very confused as to what a market is. It's not a bureau that has a discussion and then nods through massive energy price support because it's justified, but gets incensed over far smaller tax cuts. No wonder the level of discussion on PB on this issue barely gets above the juvenile.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
When I hear lockdown - I think about what Boris Johnson announced in March 2020. So I think we've spent less than 1 year in lockdown... a few months in March 2020, and then again from the Winter of 2020/21, and we were definitely out by July 2021.
I've been going to watch Exeter Chiefs for years. (I haven't.)
Doesn't mean I was sitting in the stadium for two years solid.
It is an ongoing, pervasive, pernicious state of mind that went on for years. Whether the government was at any particular time telling us who we could have in our own houses or not.
Ah okay - I follow you now. I was worried I'd missed a year somewhere in the COVID timeline.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
So I only just had it this summer after 3 jabs - the illness itself was a bad flu, I was bedbound for a few days with a high temp, and didn't actually have much in the way of bad lung stuff.
Problem I have now is, a few months after that, I'm still exhausted, I'm having headaches and brainfog, I'm getting muscle aches and chest pain all the time. I used to walk home most days from the office, about 4.5 miles in about an hour depending on weather and if I popped into the shops. I can't do half of that atm without breaking into flopsweats and wheezing.
Even if you think it's fine for people to get sick and die - the long term impact of this won't go away. My doc is assuming it's long covid, but I'm going to go for tests, impacting an already crippled healthcare system. I can't work as efficiently as I have been, my quality of life has dramatically reduced - hell I'm finding doing 30 mins - 1 hour of housework hard. And I'm in my early 30s. We have no idea how long these symptoms will last, or if we can treat them. That's a strain on our healthcare system, a strain on our labour productivity, a strain on society.
And if we keep letting wave after wave hit the populace, the chance people have of getting ill and staying ill gets closer to 1. A nation enfeebled by this is a pretty significant threat, in my view.
I'm sorry you're not feeling good, and hope you're feeling better soon.
Please take what follows as honest discord and not a belittlement of how you're feeling, but with all respect I'm sorry to say that shit happens, viruses exist, and we need to get used to it.
If the healthcare system is crippled, then people will die. If people die, then they come off waiting lists and stop needing pensions, or care, or ... eventually a new equilibrium is found.
Its horrible, and its unpleasant, but its also true. What is the alternative? How do we prevent a rampant virus from spreading? The virus can not be contained or controlled, its hubris to suggest it can be, unless we lockdown for about six months to remove and permanently seal up the borders, permanently prevent international trade and permanently prevent international travel.
Realistically, post-vaccines is as good as it gets.
We can reduce the spread of viruses and other pathogens, and routinely do so. We eradicated smallpox and rinderpest, and are making good progress against polio. We contained SARS and MERS. We work every year to minimise the impact of flu, through vaccinations, through behaviour and through reducing infection in animal populations. We work every year to minimise the impact of HIV/AIDS, through behaviour, testing and contact tracing.
Likewise, there is plenty we can do to reduce COVID-19 cases: good air filtration in buildings, encouraging those with symptoms to not go into work and to wear masks, vaccination campaigns. These methods are effective and they are cost effective. But libertarians like to pretend we’re impotent because they are so allergic* to any form of collective action. Bart’s “let them die in the streets” is perhaps at the extreme end of that…
You're right we do vaccinate against the flu. And I'm all for vaccines for Covid.
I've had 3 vaccines, I doubt I'll have any more but if offered more I would do my bit and get a jab. My grandparents that are still alive have had five vaccines each.
So yes, vaccinated for Covid, like we vaccinate against the flu. Great. But no to masks, or lockdowns, or restrictions or staying at home when you're healthy but a carrier or any other nonsense.
You response seems minimally connected to what I wrote. I didn’t mention a single restriction or lockdowns.
We have public health information campaigns to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet. What’s wrong with having public health information campaigns to encourage people to wear a mask and not go into work when they have symptoms of a respiratory infection?
We have sewerage systems to provide clean water (with the occasional outpouring of poo onto beaches under the Conservatives). What’s wrong with having air filtration systems in buildings to provide clean air?
You appear to be ideologically opposed to the mere idea that we can do something about COVID. We have to be impotent to justify your libertarianism, just as others on the right argue that the economy is in such a mess that we are impotent to the markets rather than admit that Truss/Kwarteng got it wrong, just as others on the right argue that there’s nothing we can do to stop Putin, so let’s make Ukraine sue for peace.
Encouraging people to wear a mask is dystopian whereas advising not go into work when you have symptoms of a respiratory infection is common sense. Advising people not to go to work when they have no symptoms yet have bizarrely chosen to take a Covid test (which showed positive) is still an issue I understand. Perhaps Truss could usefully do something about this?
I thought Chris Philp did very well on R4 this morning.
He answered as best he could Martha's questions and was polite but persistent.
And he didn't side-foot the ball into the open goal when he was repeatedly quizzed about the BoE's activity in the bond market, that being that there is likely more than one Pension Fund treasurer whose oversight committee should be asking what the chuffing hell they were doing so heavily reliant on derivatives of the type that lead to the GFC.
As I was taught to ask clients on Day 1 of my time at a derivatives/structured product house: are your views really that complicated?
We have public health information campaigns to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet. What’s wrong with having public health information campaigns to encourage people to wear a mask and not go into work when they have symptoms of a respiratory infection?
We have sewerage systems to provide clean water (with the occasional outpouring of poo onto beaches under the Conservatives). What’s wrong with having air filtration systems in buildings to provide clean air?
I agree with you on the public information campaign, but I'm sorry to have to inform you that raw sewage poured on to beaches and into rivers under Labour too. Panorama did an exposé in 2009:
And there is a very long history of this. See the Victorians etc…
What is needed is an incremental tightening of the discharge rules. This provides the consistent pressure to improve things - as has been proved with many types of pollution in many places around the world.
The big new sewer in London is coming online at the moment, by the way.
BREAKING: Hospital admissions of covid positive patients in England up 48% in a week.
Fourth Covid wave of 2022 now in full effect
At this point the only answer is dark, sardonic laughter, and a stiff scotch before noon
At this point the only answer is to stop worrying about Covid.
I'm not joking when I say if people get sick and die, they get sick and die. We've spent years locked down, we've rolled out is four or five rounds of vaccines now. Seriously, get over it already.
We haven't "spent years locked down".
Yes we have. They lasted for a period of years and at any time during that period we didn't know when the next one was going to occur.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Yes i imagine lockdown in a nice house in Hampstead was quite pleasant..a walk on the heath everyday whilst tutting at the covidiots sitting on park benches
Indeed.
But hasn't the opposite been shown? That those most in favour of lockdowns - the young, the precarious and the like - also had the worst experience of lockdown. They just understood that the sacrifice was necessary for society to keep functioning. Whereas a lot of the people moaning the most, and demanding people go into the office asap, are rich old guys who do have mansions, and in many cases, have worked from home as journalists for years...
I don't know I haven't read the breakdowns. I would be amazed (but then PB knowledge is amazing) if the young were in favour of lockdowns when as far as I can tell they almost continuously ignored them throughout the years they were in operation. Or is it one of those survey answer questions to "would you like world peace" or "should there be higher taxes".
I’d have to dig deeper on the question, but we know some predictors of poor adherence to guidelines or regulations across the pandemic. Being young and male were predictive of lower adherence. But also we saw those who struggled with following restrictions were (unsurprisingly) less likely to follow them, so financial distress and having dependent children at home were both predictive of poor adherence.
Meanwhile, the young were, if I remember correctly, also more worried about COVID-19 on average than the middle aged. That may not be the same youngsters who were following regulations less. I’d guess that there was a greater dichotomy: some ignoring the rules, others very worried. We’re working on a paper looking at predictors of worry across the pandemic. Remind me to report back in a few months…
If Truss cannot restore confidence with the markets very soon, surely she will have to be forced out of number 10? There is no other credible emergency replacement than Teresa May, in my opinion. She actually won a General Election. As did Boris - but I can't see his return as a unity candidate in a coronation.
Ken Clarke is saying they have to makes some sort of statement in the next few days to calm the markets, and it can't wait until November, according to the jazzman.
Didn't the BoE do that just yesterday?
Not sure what kind of statement you expect them to make. Reversing on the mini budget won't calm the market since the market has woken up to the energy market money being the issue, not the two billion disputed politically in the news, and reversing that energy support isn't viable.
There's no point acting like headless chickens now, keep calm and carry on. And the BoE buying gilts rather than selling them should calm the markets down.
The market didn’t go crazy until the (non-)budget. The market was OK when the Government had previously announced action on energy costs.
Indeed, which was the market being illogical. The market often is.
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
I agree markets can be illogical. That’s why I favour strong regulation of the markets. What’s odd is you saying the markets are illogical when you want to leave everything up to the markets!
However, in this case, I think the markets saw a plan to massively increase borrowing to fund both specific spending (including energy support) and to support large tax cuts in order to, supposedly, create growth and they thought, “That’s bollocks. That won’t create growth. Kwarteng’s got it wrong, UK borrowing will go up way more than we’d previously expected, sell £s.”
This wasn’t about “a further £2 billion tax cut”. There was plenty more in the (non)budget that went beyond the previously announced reversal of Sunak’s increases. The market reacted to the (non)budget and the market said, “This is a stupid budget.” Pretending that the market just happened to react at that point to some earlier event is what’s absurd.
As I said to you the other day, I believe in evolution. I believe in creative destruction. Too many view any kind of destruction as a negative to be prevented. In many ways our views on healthcare and our views on the economy differ on this key principle.
Strong regulation of the markets allows illogical behaviour to become institutionalised rather than challenged, which leads to stagnation.
Leaving everything up to the market allows creative destruction to occur. It allows mistakes and illogical behaviour to come to the fore but then be better able to be challenged, by those who behave better.
What was announced new at the mini budget was small change compared to what had come before. The markets were illogical not to be alarmed at the hundreds of billions already announced, but they were also illogical to act like a panicked stampede at a couple billion more on top, which is why the Bank was right to use its powers to intervene and stop the stampede and calm the markets down.
Comments
Sikorski is a bit of a loose cannon.
Conservative PMs do have an unenviable track record of surrounding themselves with weapons-grade pillocks....
I've had 3 vaccines, I doubt I'll have any more but if offered more I would do my bit and get a jab. My grandparents that are still alive have had five vaccines each.
So yes, vaccinated for Covid, like we vaccinate against the flu. Great. But no to masks, or lockdowns, or restrictions or staying at home when you're healthy but a carrier or any other nonsense.
It should be something like: Do you 1) believe in alien abduction or the Lizard people 2) Of the opinion that the moon landings were faked 3) Believe that Britain "got its sovereignty back" after Brexit.
If yes to any of these absurdities then such voters are limited to only voting for Town Councillors in Epping.
The current reduction in sales (in the US) will correct itself as prices fall.
Forget the Laffer Curve. I have stumbled across the intellectual underpinnings of Trussnomics.
Even though she is struggling with their practical application.
https://twitter.com/BappoNoHacko_/status/1575244754547519490
And whilst I did share my position in part to highlight the personal impact of the illness - the systemic impact is bigger. Why are unions so strong atm? Because the labour market everywhere is highly inflexible because there are not a huge number of workers floating in the market looking for jobs because 1) lots of people died or are permanently disabled and 2) lots of people now have long term illnesses that mean they are less productive, and some jobs that previously took 1 person now might take 1.5 people. Why is the NHS in freefall? Because more people are ill, more people are long term ill and there are fewer nurses and doctors, partly due to long term systemic issues and immigration, but also because lots of medical workers have had to throw in the towel or had breakdowns because of workload over covid.
Your position of "meh, people will die and get sick, what can we do, what hubris it is to expect humans to be able to deal with such a force of nature" is antithetical to a functioning society. Everything we do is hubris against the forces of nature, that is modern humanity. A lot of that has really bad consequences *coughclimatechangecough* but also a lot of it is something to aspire to - technology and culture that enriches our existence beyond measure.
There was a middle road not taken - a state led acceptance of reasonable adjustment to a new normal: masks, testing, work from home where possible, etc. that was just abandoned to "do what you think is best". I still wear my mask on public transport and in heavy crowds, but it doesn't matter because you need a certain % of the population to do that for it to work. And that could have easily been kept alive if government wanted to. But they didn't, and now the false equivalence rules...
It was policies, not skin colour, that decided the last leadership election.
Please don't let's go down the old, rich blokes in charming houses wondering what the big fuss about lockdown route is again.
Putin has already lost. When he realises that he will know that using nukes isn't going to help him hold on in the Kremlin.
Hopefully we do get a 50% or so drop in house prices in the UK. Would love to see house prices back at a 3x multiple in the North and a 4x multiple in London, just as it used to be.
Sometimes a bit of pain and disruption is needed to fix the fundamentals. We may need to go through that now.
Otherwise, time to replace the 22....
Use your brain. He can't now "walk away" even if he wants to. This is "Russia". No Russian leader can abandon parts of Russia. This annexation is designed to tie his own hands and those of any successor; the war is now existential and is being fought on Russian territory
The only way out now, bar a black swan like Putin dying, seems to be
.
1. outright defeat of Russia and the seizing of "Russian" territory, which feels unlikely given that Russia would use nukes to get us to back off
or
2. He threatens us. We blink. We oblige Ukraine to seek peace. A terrible peace. And then we all wait and pray for Putin to croak (during which time we will try to undermine Russia and the Ukrainians will go into partisan mode)
When Bohr saw the Manhattan Project, he remarked that he had been right when he had suggested that to build an atomic bomb, would require turning a whole country into a factory.
The B29 program was bigger than the Manhattan Project.
"She planned on making all our pensions insolvent?!?!? Christ ...."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/29/tory-mp-truss-kwarteng-labour
You are fucking clueless Bart with that statement.
Enough of your comical psycho babbling now, this is a serious moment for this country, and I need to put my foot down on these red herrings. The truth is government tried to put the £150-250B for the important Energy Price Support on the UK credit card, and the markets declined it.
You are right though, the opposition party’s would have tried to put through the Energy Price Support “largely” on the UK credit card too, and they too would have got same response from the markets.
You don't have to believe me, but I know a member who said just that, and voted. Though he used, somewhat inaccurately, the P word.
No doubt there are exist people who might do the same in Labour. And whether it made any difference to the result is deeply questionable.
I'm a bit of an expert on geopolitics now as our Ukrainians like playing Crusader Kings 3 on the PS5. More accurately they like to watch me play it for their entertainment and criticise all my decisions.
And one reason Putin might move faster than expected to save himself:
"The Russian economy will ‘die by winter’ because of the ‘catastrophic consequences’ of the military mobilization, a top Russian economist warns"
https://fortune.com/2022/09/26/russian-economy-die-by-winter-says-economist-vladislav-inozemtsev-putin-mobilization/
So I think we've spent less than 1 year in lockdown... a few months in March 2020, and then again from the Winter of 2020/21, and we were definitely out by July 2021.
If he had seized the moment and resigned, rather than letting the Boris affair drag on for another two or three months, he would be PM now.
b) no "Tory-inclined acquaintance" (whatever that means) of @Chris said that to him.
If it gets down to around 3-5 or so I'll have to think of hedging... or holding on. I'm ahead if she goes this year. You can back it at 8 (plus whatever boost is, probably 8.5) with Ladbrokes.
https://twitter.com/robfordmancs/status/1575409454425808897
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1575405893935665152
The sheer scale of Russian incompetence and disregard for its mobilized civilians. These men complain they were left in the freezing field with no shelter — not even a tent — and no rations for the second day. “Like a flock of sheep.” How many will make it to Ukraine?
As I said, the market knew about the hundred and fifty billion potentially for energy support, it knew about the hundreds of billions we've just borrowed for Covid, it knew about the £38 billion in tax rise reversals Truss had committed to.
The notion that a further £2 billion (in theory) tax cut, which will likely cost nothing like that and could even be revenue neutral or positive, is the irresponsible straw that broke the camel's back is just prima facie absurd.
We have public health information campaigns to encourage people to wash their hands after using the toilet. What’s wrong with having public health information campaigns to encourage people to wear a mask and not go into work when they have symptoms of a respiratory infection?
We have sewerage systems to provide clean water (with the occasional outpouring of poo onto beaches under the Conservatives). What’s wrong with having air filtration systems in buildings to provide clean air?
You appear to be ideologically opposed to the mere idea that we can do something about COVID. We have to be impotent to justify your libertarianism, just as others on the right argue that the economy is in such a mess that we are impotent to the markets rather than admit that Truss/Kwarteng got it wrong, just as others on the right argue that there’s nothing we can do to stop Putin, so let’s make Ukraine sue for peace.
@TheLawSociety
·
1h
“If solicitors do not get parity on the bare minimum 15% recommended by Lord Bellamy, the Ministry of Justice will have made it clear that there is no future in criminal defence practice and
*we will advise our members not to undertake this work*" 6/7
If you know a member who said that then you need to revise your social or political circle.
As for @Chris - I objected to it because it was a nasty cheap shot that he made up because no one in all seriousness, if they had spent a moment in Chris' company, would have said such a thing to him.
I have a feeling we are however headed for a variation of 2.
Controlled burn-backs are better at preventing rampaging forest fires, but if you don't have them and allow the undergrowth never to be removed then the problems build up until a rampaging forest fire becomes necessary and unpreventable. We're possibly at that point now.
Had we had brief periods of negative equity repeatedly in the past thirty years, then we'd now be in a position where prices were reasonable, as they'd bounced up and down. Unfortunately we've taken a toxic attitude that prices must never fall and they've ratchetted higher and higher to the point it will take a 50% fall to get back to reasonable levels.
Smaller falls more often would have been better, than a major fall at once.
As for ordinary Russians, have their opinions ever really counted? But I think you'd be surprised how many still support the war. Indeed as it gets more serious that support might actually grow, as the war becomes existential for everyone. I am reminded of this now prophetic piece which appeared in the Spectator, months ago:
"Mikhail looked my way and laughed. Like I had a point, but it was beyond the wit of man to make it better. Ludmila was now gazing at the empty vodka bottle disconsolately. The mountain air was still and warm. Mikhail disappeared, then somehow returned with another vodka bottle.
"‘This one is really homemade,’ he said, chuckling. With refilled glasses, we toasted each other, we toasted peace, and we watched the stars glittering over Nakhchivan, the hostile Azeri exclave. Then Mikhail said: ‘You know, I hate the war, but we have to win it. I am scared that Putin will order a mobilisation, but if he does, I will fight. Russia is my country. Russia must win the war.’"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/an-existential-war-even-wealthy-emigres-are-prepared-to-fight-for-russia
Doesn't mean I was sitting in the stadium for two years solid.
It is an ongoing, pervasive, pernicious state of mind that went on for years. Whether the government was at any particular time telling us who we could have in our own houses or not.
A whole pack of tax cuts that the market didn't support.
@MoonRabbit I pointed this out to you yesterday yet today you are still spurting the same insane rubbish...
We are calling his bluff. Hopefully the Chinese and others will also let him know it's not on. Then he folds.
If he tries to bolster his bluff with a demonstration strike with a tactical nuke I'm confident the NATO response will be robust enough that he'll fold at that point. It's even possible that NATO intelligence will be good enough that they'll act pre-emptively.
We're not backing down.
A much greater risk is that the Russians take out the Norwegian gas pipelines. That's the level of terrorist action that they are capable of.
Among the Tory members I know, the issue with Sunak was the non-dom thing and it’s wider ramifications - the sense that he is semi detached from the U.K.
Kemi comes across as 100% British, by comparison.
None of which means it's wrong to worry about a big winter wave and take precautions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVn731Uwcyo
Its rather cute you keep trying to make things personal like that, I think you secretly enjoy having people to argue with and maybe just get frustrated that you can't match my intellect or arguments so you just turn personal instead, its a bit like a young boy tugging on a girls pigtails because they like them.
However, in this case, I think the markets saw a plan to massively increase borrowing to fund both specific spending (including energy support) and to support large tax cuts in order to, supposedly, create growth and they thought, “That’s bollocks. That won’t create growth. Kwarteng’s got it wrong, UK borrowing will go up way more than we’d previously expected, sell £s.”
This wasn’t about “a further £2 billion tax cut”. There was plenty more in the (non)budget that went beyond the previously announced reversal of Sunak’s increases. The market reacted to the (non)budget and the market said, “This is a stupid budget.” Pretending that the market just happened to react at that point to some earlier event is what’s absurd.
XX
You should know this as much as I know this, because you can actually listen to what the IMF and the markets are saying like I am listening to what they are actually saying.
- what happened in 2014. Nearly all the experts expected a repeat. Until “I need weapons not a ride out of town”…
- the only previous defeat of an armoured invasion force by anti-tank missiles I can think of is Chad vs Libya. All other wars have shown antitank missiles to be nasty but not war winning.
Its just like the petrol forecourts running out of petrol last year, not because there was any serious disruption to supplies, but instead because a couple of forecourts ran out while switching from 5% to 10% biofuel unleaded and this got misreported and led to a stampede at the forecourts, which led to us having a nationwide fuel shortage for no good reason.
Its important to differentiate between the short term and long term, irrational behaviour always exists and identifying it is important.
Westminster Voting Intention:
LAB: 39% (-1)
CON: 35% (+2)
LDM: 10% (-4)
SNP: 5% (+1)
GRN: 4% (-2)
RFM: 3% (+1)
UKIP: 2% (+2)
Via @Kantar_UKI, 22-26 Sep.
Changes with 18-22 Aug.
*80% of fieldwork BEFORE mini-budget.
I thought Chris Philp did very well on R4 this morning.
He answered as best he could Martha's questions and was polite but persistent.
And he didn't side-foot the ball into the open goal when he was repeatedly quizzed about the BoE's activity in the bond market, that being that there is likely more than one Pension Fund treasurer whose oversight committee should be asking what the chuffing hell they were doing so heavily reliant on derivatives of the type that lead to the GFC.
As I was taught to ask clients on Day 1 of my time at a derivatives/structured product house: are your views really that complicated?
It really is not. It is perfectly plausible, and America has the means and motive. This is not Trumpite nonsense
We just don't know. It could also be Ukraine, Russia, China... or even maverick elements within all four countries
What is needed is an incremental tightening of the discharge rules. This provides the consistent pressure to improve things - as has been proved with many types of pollution in many places around the world.
The big new sewer in London is coming online at the moment, by the way.
Meanwhile, the young were, if I remember correctly, also more worried about COVID-19 on average than the middle aged. That may not be the same youngsters who were following regulations less. I’d guess that there was a greater dichotomy: some ignoring the rules, others very worried. We’re working on a paper looking at predictors of worry across the pandemic. Remind me to report back in a few months…
If Truss cannot restore confidence with the markets very soon, surely she will have to be forced out of number 10? There is no other credible emergency replacement than Teresa May, in my opinion. She actually won a General Election. As did Boris - but I can't see his return as a unity candidate in a coronation.
Strong regulation of the markets allows illogical behaviour to become institutionalised rather than challenged, which leads to stagnation.
Leaving everything up to the market allows creative destruction to occur. It allows mistakes and illogical behaviour to come to the fore but then be better able to be challenged, by those who behave better.
What was announced new at the mini budget was small change compared to what had come before. The markets were illogical not to be alarmed at the hundreds of billions already announced, but they were also illogical to act like a panicked stampede at a couple billion more on top, which is why the Bank was right to use its powers to intervene and stop the stampede and calm the markets down.