This is why we can’t have economic growth.
Tory MPs don’t want it.

https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1575930863170523137?s=46&t=MDvj2PBicgdKQMDGjeclEA

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

You seem to be in quite a difficult place since we lost HMQ. I do wish you all the best in finding your equilibrium again.

glw said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

glw said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

If Russia tried to bomb the UK most of their missiles would probably be duds and those that aren't could be intercepted.

Quite frankly, Russia isn't the USSR and doesn't have the capabilities to annihilate the world, any more than it has the capability to take Kyiv.

How's that going to happen? The UK has nothing that can intercept an ICBM.

America does though.

America has a limited ABM system that is not capable of defeating a fullscale attack from Russia. That covers US territory, primarily from the Pacific, it does very little good for us. There are some theatre-scale deployable defences as well, of limited utility.

None of these systems will do anything to stop a cruise missile with a nuclear warhead, and the Russians have plenty of those as well.

The purpose of the US system is to defeat a few missiles from a rogue state like North Korea, not to shield the US from a large attack. The Russians have an ABM system to protect Moscow, although there is a fair amount of debate at how effective that might turn out to be.

Anyone thinking they can ride out a nuclear war behind some missile shield is daft.

The Soviets were daft enough to believe Reagan's bluff with "Star Wars". To such an extent that trying to emulate it contributed greatly to their eventual bankruptcy.

And no. Nothing to do with the Death Star.

wooliedyed said:

There are no air raid sirens any more. The 4 minute warning no longer exists.
They might reinstate '3 bangs' fallout warnings

You will get a text now.

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

This sketch about Doenitz cracks me up every time.

"Well, they'd hardly give me the job if things were going well..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYz1ADttI1g

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

There are some posters who need to take a chill pill. Despite all of the rhetoric, Putin is not going to use nukes. Here and now he is the master of all he surveys. Commanding propagandists to make the stupider parts of his population ignorant. Mobilising the population for one last push for the Rodina.

Go nuclear and he loses all control. Because the west have to retaliate. Which means he has to retaliate harder. Then harder back. And before he has a way out someone is launching a counterforce strike and that is that.

Putin likes power. Control. He won't hand it over to chaos by playing nuke. So chill out. He's annexed chunks of Ukraine and will likely keep them. Which is Bad. But escalation and general war will be worse. And western powers and also Moscow are not about to sacrifice their capital cities for Kherson.

Evening all

So we've now reached Febrile Friday with @Leon once again contemplating my incineration. Unlike him, I shall go to meet my maker never having eaten at "Grouch's" but then again he's never had a full English at my cafe in the Barking Road.

Never mind.

It's probably been Labour's most successful Party Conference in a generation although they've done little to achieve that other than avoid almost all problems.

I'm far from convinced Reeves and Starmer have the answers - the awkward issue of borrowing remains the elephant in the room. As I've said, Kwarteng and Truss have catastrophically misjudged the change in public mood and the notion of "fairness" is now pre-eminent.

Cutting taxes on income in favour of taxing wealth is now seen as the "fairest" way forward. Now, rather like claiming AV is proportional, taxing wealth isn't fair either and the losers will of course shout the loudest. The argument is there's a lot of wealth but not many people have it - I think it's more a question of how you define wealth.

Money in the bank, land, paintings - are any and all measures of wealth? Yes and perhaps no. How would you assess your own wealth for taxation? Presumably with most people that means the property asset(s) so you start with a property ownership tax based on the value of your property or perhaps the land it's sitting on.

Not everyone owns property - what about businesses, cash, gold, diamonds, racehorses, ferraris etc, etc?

What is wealth and how do you define it? VAT was a way of getting after the purchase of wealth - it was meant as a luxury goods tax before it became a largely catch-all tax.

The trouble is if I go into Tesco's and buy a pint of milk I'm not charged based on my wealth. Theoretically, a wealthy individual could afford to pay £10 for a pint of milk while a poor person should only pay 10p so it's as much about affordability as wealth.

We can't all afford to dine at Groucho's. Is being able to a measure of wealth which could or should be taxed further than the cost of the meal itself?

It's superficially attractive but raises a number of questions.

Gardenwalker said:

This is why we can’t have economic growth.
Tory MPs don’t want it.

https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1575930863170523137?s=46&t=MDvj2PBicgdKQMDGjeclEA

I voted him in, and I'll vote him out.

Leon said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

Sunak is very largely responsible (along with Bojo, but what economic or fiscal policies was he ever closely involved in?), along with the BOE, for our current economical situation. Liz is simply trying to sort out the mess left by his smarmy, vertically-challenged imitation of an economical deathwatch beetle. He would have been an abysmal PM, and we dodged a bullet.

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Goebbels was Kanzler, Doenitz was Fuhrer.

Have a look at the Wiki page on Hitler’s testament and the govt he ordered to be formed.

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Kaboom. Zinger.

Casino_Royale said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Kaboom. Zinger.

Isn’t it time for our annual State of The World plenum?

Luckyguy1983 said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

You seem to be in quite a difficult place since we lost HMQ. I do wish you all the best in finding your equilibrium again.

The death of HMQ massively affected me. Probably more than the death of anyone else in my family, and remember: I was pallbearer for my brother-in-law who died of a rare form of cancer aged 53. That was awful.

I don't know what that says about me. Not sure its good.

All I know is that I loved HMQ and felt secure with her and felt totally at sea when she went.

glw said:

wooliedyed said:

There are no air raid sirens any more. The 4 minute warning no longer exists.
They might reinstate '3 bangs' fallout warnings

You will get a text now.

That should get rid of the oldies. While everyone else is seeking shelter, they’ll still be wandering around Tesco.

darkage said:

Leon said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

I don't think that the 'turmoil' can actually be ended, there are too many difficult external problems. What we need is someone with the appropriate temperament and judgement to be PM. Truss has proved already to be not up to the task.

May PM. Sunak COE if he wants it, IMHO. It’s a leadership team designed purely to head off collapse in 2024, nothing else, but I think it would reassure the markets. If Rishi steadies the ship he’d then be well placed to become leader after the GE defeat. May gets a nice send off into the sunset having had less of an ignominious departure.

Gardenwalker said:

ping said:

The LDI DB pensions scandal could well turn into something eerily similar to Major’s ERM fiasco. Potentially even worse, actually. Taxpayers pumping in good money after bad to stop them going insolvent.

I must confess I don’t understand it.

But it smells like the pensions industry decided to risk the whole fucking farm on exotic instruments, and got found out on Tuesday.

Am I wrong?

Sounds typical.

Some doom pron for @Leon. Here is what faces us in a nuclear confrontation
Putin has a load of battleground small yield stuff but max range 500km, its a Ukraine issue unless he reaches Germany.
Last source i can find has about 1700 warheads operational and deployed. 100 in heavy bombers, 1100 icbms silo based or on mobile launchers and just over 500 submarine launched.
Of the ICBMs, we dont know if the hypersonics are deployed yet, prob very few if so but the Satans are 10 warhead mirvs, each warhead 800kt max yield. City killers. Hes got 460 of those warheads or 46 missiles. Hes got another 160 single warhead 800kt and 180 400kt warheads on 30 x 6 warhead mirvs. 230 or so 100kt and all 500 sub are 100 kt or 50kt but can be fitted with bigger yields
The 100 heavy bombers have whatever fat load he wants to dump
Pick out of that whats rusted, dysfunctional, gets intercepted, is destroyed on the ground or is stuck at sub base.

Anotger 3000 warheads awaiting decommisioning but after a general exchange who is left to arrange getting them out and reconditioning?

In 1983 they had 35,000, 25,000 long range etc

darkage said:

Leon said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

I don't think that the 'turmoil' can actually be ended, there are too many difficult external problems. What we need is someone with the appropriate temperament and judgement to be PM. Truss has proved already to be not up to the task.

Based on the evidence we have, that's not true. Truss set out her policy programme, and is implementing it. She defended her approach well at PMQs, actually answering her questions, and she has defended her policies in back to back interviews, where again, she pauses (clearly the crime of the century), thinks about her answer, and gives a proper answer. She's already withstood more political and media headwinds than Boris did at any one time in his miserable Prime Ministerial career, and not given an inch. It cannot be easy with every fat-arsed jelly-spined middle aged middle class twat, including the so-called Tories, joining the remoaner backing singers in the chorus for her to go, and bugger me if it doesn't make me want to support her all the more.

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Goebbels was Kanzler, Doenitz was Fuhrer.

Have a look at the Wiki page on Hitler’s testament and the govt he ordered to be formed.

Goebbels was never styled "Fuhrer". He was (supposed to be) Doenitz's Chancellor.

You are displaying HYUFD levels of obstinacy. Read the source I suggested. Anyway, this is boring, although perhaps oddly apt as we may all be on the eve of destruction.

Leon said:

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

I can tell how much you're looking forward to the upcoming 20 years of centre-left Woke (presumably) Government.

Leon said:

RochdalePioneers said:

There are some posters who need to take a chill pill. Despite all of the rhetoric, Putin is not going to use nukes. Here and now he is the master of all he surveys. Commanding propagandists to make the stupider parts of his population ignorant. Mobilising the population for one last push for the Rodina.

Go nuclear and he loses all control. Because the west have to retaliate. Which means he has to retaliate harder. Then harder back. And before he has a way out someone is launching a counterforce strike and that is that.

Putin likes power. Control. He won't hand it over to chaos by playing nuke. So chill out. He's annexed chunks of Ukraine and will likely keep them. Which is Bad. But escalation and general war will be worse. And western powers and also Moscow are not about to sacrifice their capital cities for Kherson.

But this only works if the war ends, now. Which it will not. Ukraine is winning, and there is no clear sign that Putin's mobilisation can reverse it, yet

Indeed, why should it? Ukraine has mobilised the entire nation and now has a million highly motivated men and women, defending home and hearth, armed with NATO weapons, fighting one million unmotivated Russian conscripts in slippers who are far from home and have no fancy guns

So Putin will likely continue to lose, in even more humiliating fashion, until it very soon reaches a critical point where he has to escalate, or accept defeat and probable death at the hands of his internal foes

What will he choose?

That's why he told Kyiv to negotiate. He wants to switch this off and claim that the bits he just stole was his entire objective. Whilst Kyiv doesn't want to do that, NATO may encourage them depending how this bogs down.

The mobilisation isn't there to provide more troops to smash NATO. Its to provide human shields to discourage Ukraine from coming after these chunks of "Russia". It bogs down. They talk. An unhappy ceasefire. Etc. But no nuclear fire on Camden.

stodge said:

Evening all

So we've now reached Febrile Friday with @Leon once again contemplating my incineration. Unlike him, I shall go to meet my maker never having eaten at "Grouch's" but then again he's never had a full English at my cafe in the Barking Road.

Never mind.

It's probably been Labour's most successful Party Conference in a generation although they've done little to achieve that other than avoid almost all problems.

I'm far from convinced Reeves and Starmer have the answers - the awkward issue of borrowing remains the elephant in the room. As I've said, Kwarteng and Truss have catastrophically misjudged the change in public mood and the notion of "fairness" is now pre-eminent.

Cutting taxes on income in favour of taxing wealth is now seen as the "fairest" way forward. Now, rather like claiming AV is proportional, taxing wealth isn't fair either and the losers will of course shout the loudest. The argument is there's a lot of wealth but not many people have it - I think it's more a question of how you define wealth.

Money in the bank, land, paintings - are any and all measures of wealth? Yes and perhaps no. How would you assess your own wealth for taxation? Presumably with most people that means the property asset(s) so you start with a property ownership tax based on the value of your property or perhaps the land it's sitting on.

Not everyone owns property - what about businesses, cash, gold, diamonds, racehorses, ferraris etc, etc?

What is wealth and how do you define it? VAT was a way of getting after the purchase of wealth - it was meant as a luxury goods tax before it became a largely catch-all tax.

The trouble is if I go into Tesco's and buy a pint of milk I'm not charged based on my wealth. Theoretically, a wealthy individual could afford to pay £10 for a pint of milk while a poor person should only pay 10p so it's as much about affordability as wealth.

We can't all afford to dine at Groucho's. Is being able to a measure of wealth which could or should be taxed further than the cost of the meal itself?

It's superficially attractive but raises a number of questions.

A tax on assets that are not readily realisable should cover wealth, and be difficult to avoid in the short term. Including all residential property in the ambit of Inheritance Tax would be a start. Yes, unfair to Londoners, but the rest of us could cope with it.

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Goebbels was Kanzler, Doenitz was Fuhrer.

Have a look at the Wiki page on Hitler’s testament and the govt he ordered to be formed.

Goebbels was never styled "Fuhrer". He was (supposed to be) Doenitz's Chancellor.

You are displaying HYUFD levels of obstinacy. Read the source I suggested. Anyway, this is boring, although perhaps oddly apt as we may all be on the eve of destruction.

NEIN! NEIN! NEIN!

In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

Fairliered said:

stodge said:

Evening all

So we've now reached Febrile Friday with @Leon once again contemplating my incineration. Unlike him, I shall go to meet my maker never having eaten at "Grouch's" but then again he's never had a full English at my cafe in the Barking Road.

Never mind.

It's probably been Labour's most successful Party Conference in a generation although they've done little to achieve that other than avoid almost all problems.

I'm far from convinced Reeves and Starmer have the answers - the awkward issue of borrowing remains the elephant in the room. As I've said, Kwarteng and Truss have catastrophically misjudged the change in public mood and the notion of "fairness" is now pre-eminent.

Cutting taxes on income in favour of taxing wealth is now seen as the "fairest" way forward. Now, rather like claiming AV is proportional, taxing wealth isn't fair either and the losers will of course shout the loudest. The argument is there's a lot of wealth but not many people have it - I think it's more a question of how you define wealth.

Money in the bank, land, paintings - are any and all measures of wealth? Yes and perhaps no. How would you assess your own wealth for taxation? Presumably with most people that means the property asset(s) so you start with a property ownership tax based on the value of your property or perhaps the land it's sitting on.

Not everyone owns property - what about businesses, cash, gold, diamonds, racehorses, ferraris etc, etc?

What is wealth and how do you define it? VAT was a way of getting after the purchase of wealth - it was meant as a luxury goods tax before it became a largely catch-all tax.

The trouble is if I go into Tesco's and buy a pint of milk I'm not charged based on my wealth. Theoretically, a wealthy individual could afford to pay £10 for a pint of milk while a poor person should only pay 10p so it's as much about affordability as wealth.

We can't all afford to dine at Groucho's. Is being able to a measure of wealth which could or should be taxed further than the cost of the meal itself?

It's superficially attractive but raises a number of questions.

A tax on assets that are not readily realisable should cover wealth, and be difficult to avoid in the short term. Including all residential property in the ambit of Inheritance Tax would be a start. Yes, unfair to Londoners, but the rest of us could cope with it.

Stodge was a LibDem once I believe.
He seems to have gone on quite a journey.

NEW: Tory voters believe Rishi Sunak would be a **better** Prime Minister than Liz Truss, per poll for Telegraph

TRUSS
Good PM 34%
Bad PM 51%
(net -17pts)

SUNAK
Good PM 45%
Bad PM 42%
(net +3pts)

@JLPartnersPolls polling

Luckyguy1983 said:

darkage said:

Leon said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

I don't think that the 'turmoil' can actually be ended, there are too many difficult external problems. What we need is someone with the appropriate temperament and judgement to be PM. Truss has proved already to be not up to the task.

Based on the evidence we have, that's not true. Truss set out her policy programme, and is implementing it. She defended her approach well at PMQs, actually answering her questions, and she has defended her policies in back to back interviews, where again, she pauses (clearly the crime of the century), thinks about her answer, and gives a proper answer. She's already withstood more political and media headwinds than Boris did at any one time in his miserable Prime Ministerial career, and not given an inch. It cannot be easy with every fat-arsed jelly-spined middle aged middle class twat, including the so-called Tories, joining the remoaner backing singers in the chorus for her to go, and bugger me if it doesn't make me want to support her all the more.

The problem is that Truss is out of kilter with majority opinion and hasn't got the skill to persuade.

wooliedyed said:

Leon said:

Genius opening line

"Polish officials said on Friday they had distributed anti-radiation tablets to fire departments nationwide in case of exposure triggered by the war in neighbouring Ukraine, while denying there was cause for alarm."

Officials said it was a routine initiative “in case of a potential radiation threat, which… at the moment does not exist.”"

https://insiderpaper.com/poland-preps-anti-radiation-tablets-over-nuclear-threat/


They are getting us ready, while trying not to scare us. Tricky

Lol anti radiation tablets. Homeopathy for armageddon

That's not true at all: iodine tablets make a big difference to your thyroid gland, and there fore your chance of living

Nigelb said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Stuartinromford said:

rcs1000 said:

I cannot believe this is real.

A government boasting of spending 6.5% of GDP on energy subsidies. That's insane.

Wasn't there a study a while back showing the UK as the most vulnerable big nation in Europe, due to our energy mix, shoddy insulation and stingy welfare?

Still it's not very Conservative or Thatcherite to brag about spending borrowed money, rather than focusing on outcomes.

Precisely. France has high nuclear baseload so would 'need' less support, but that's a good thing for France, not a bad thing for them.

The idea that spending is good in its own sake, rather than for what it gives, is awful. Its Brownian tractor stats, and no Tory should be doing that.

As an example of that, it’s slightly ironic that if we’d spent even half what we’re going to borrow this year on new nuclear power stations a decade back, we’d not need to burn any gas in power stations at all.
And the annual interest bill would be very small fraction of what it is now.

HPC was greenlit in 2013. I doubt it will produce power this decade.

RochdalePioneers said:

Leon said:

RochdalePioneers said:

There are some posters who need to take a chill pill. Despite all of the rhetoric, Putin is not going to use nukes. Here and now he is the master of all he surveys. Commanding propagandists to make the stupider parts of his population ignorant. Mobilising the population for one last push for the Rodina.

Go nuclear and he loses all control. Because the west have to retaliate. Which means he has to retaliate harder. Then harder back. And before he has a way out someone is launching a counterforce strike and that is that.

Putin likes power. Control. He won't hand it over to chaos by playing nuke. So chill out. He's annexed chunks of Ukraine and will likely keep them. Which is Bad. But escalation and general war will be worse. And western powers and also Moscow are not about to sacrifice their capital cities for Kherson.

But this only works if the war ends, now. Which it will not. Ukraine is winning, and there is no clear sign that Putin's mobilisation can reverse it, yet

Indeed, why should it? Ukraine has mobilised the entire nation and now has a million highly motivated men and women, defending home and hearth, armed with NATO weapons, fighting one million unmotivated Russian conscripts in slippers who are far from home and have no fancy guns

So Putin will likely continue to lose, in even more humiliating fashion, until it very soon reaches a critical point where he has to escalate, or accept defeat and probable death at the hands of his internal foes

What will he choose?

That's why he told Kyiv to negotiate. He wants to switch this off and claim that the bits he just stole was his entire objective. Whilst Kyiv doesn't want to do that, NATO may encourage them depending how this bogs down.

The mobilisation isn't there to provide more troops to smash NATO. Its to provide human shields to discourage Ukraine from coming after these chunks of "Russia". It bogs down. They talk. An unhappy ceasefire. Etc. But no nuclear fire on Camden.

The war is not going to get bogged down (except perhaps to an extent due to the weather).

It is quite likely that we will wake tomorrow to news that Russia has lost Lyman too. Not sure if that invalidates the referendum in that particular area in law but it sure does in practice.

rcs1000 said:

wooliedyed said:

Leon said:

Genius opening line

"Polish officials said on Friday they had distributed anti-radiation tablets to fire departments nationwide in case of exposure triggered by the war in neighbouring Ukraine, while denying there was cause for alarm."

Officials said it was a routine initiative “in case of a potential radiation threat, which… at the moment does not exist.”"

https://insiderpaper.com/poland-preps-anti-radiation-tablets-over-nuclear-threat/


They are getting us ready, while trying not to scare us. Tricky

Lol anti radiation tablets. Homeopathy for armageddon

That's not true at all: iodine tablets make a big difference to your thyroid gland, and there fore your chance of living

Nigelb said:

BartholomewRoberts said:

Stuartinromford said:

rcs1000 said:

I cannot believe this is real.

A government boasting of spending 6.5% of GDP on energy subsidies. That's insane.

Wasn't there a study a while back showing the UK as the most vulnerable big nation in Europe, due to our energy mix, shoddy insulation and stingy welfare?

Still it's not very Conservative or Thatcherite to brag about spending borrowed money, rather than focusing on outcomes.

Precisely. France has high nuclear baseload so would 'need' less support, but that's a good thing for France, not a bad thing for them.

The idea that spending is good in its own sake, rather than for what it gives, is awful. Its Brownian tractor stats, and no Tory should be doing that.

As an example of that, it’s slightly ironic that if we’d spent even half what we’re going to borrow this year on new nuclear power stations a decade back, we’d not need to burn any gas in power stations at all.
And the annual interest bill would be very small fraction of what it is now.

HPC was greenlit in 2013. I doubt it will produce power this decade.

Great if you avoid all the other ways radiation gets into you. Iodine is good for moderate elevated exposure but not nuclear warfare/massive fallout levels.

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

JohnO said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Casino_Royale said:

Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer.

Doenitz was the last Reichsfuhrer.

No, Goebbels was the last Reich Chancellor and Doenitz the final President (Hitler had revived the Office in his testament).

Only on pb as they say.

Goebbels was Kanzler, Doenitz was Fuhrer.

Have a look at the Wiki page on Hitler’s testament and the govt he ordered to be formed.

Goebbels was never styled "Fuhrer". He was (supposed to be) Doenitz's Chancellor.

You are displaying HYUFD levels of obstinacy. Read the source I suggested. Anyway, this is boring, although perhaps oddly apt as we may all be on the eve of destruction.

In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

Er, that’s exactly what I said.

Doenitz President
Goebbels Chancellor

Read Casino's original comment:

"Truss = Doctor Goebbels for the last 24 hours there was a Reichsfuhrer."

Hitler was the only Reichsfuhrer. Admittedly, I was wrong about Doenitz being Fuhrer, but Goebbels was NEVER styled "Fuhrer" either.

This thread has had the Threads treatment.

LostPassword said:

RochdalePioneers said:

Leon said:

RochdalePioneers said:

There are some posters who need to take a chill pill. Despite all of the rhetoric, Putin is not going to use nukes. Here and now he is the master of all he surveys. Commanding propagandists to make the stupider parts of his population ignorant. Mobilising the population for one last push for the Rodina.

Go nuclear and he loses all control. Because the west have to retaliate. Which means he has to retaliate harder. Then harder back. And before he has a way out someone is launching a counterforce strike and that is that.

Putin likes power. Control. He won't hand it over to chaos by playing nuke. So chill out. He's annexed chunks of Ukraine and will likely keep them. Which is Bad. But escalation and general war will be worse. And western powers and also Moscow are not about to sacrifice their capital cities for Kherson.

But this only works if the war ends, now. Which it will not. Ukraine is winning, and there is no clear sign that Putin's mobilisation can reverse it, yet

Indeed, why should it? Ukraine has mobilised the entire nation and now has a million highly motivated men and women, defending home and hearth, armed with NATO weapons, fighting one million unmotivated Russian conscripts in slippers who are far from home and have no fancy guns

So Putin will likely continue to lose, in even more humiliating fashion, until it very soon reaches a critical point where he has to escalate, or accept defeat and probable death at the hands of his internal foes

What will he choose?

That's why he told Kyiv to negotiate. He wants to switch this off and claim that the bits he just stole was his entire objective. Whilst Kyiv doesn't want to do that, NATO may encourage them depending how this bogs down.

The mobilisation isn't there to provide more troops to smash NATO. Its to provide human shields to discourage Ukraine from coming after these chunks of "Russia". It bogs down. They talk. An unhappy
ceasefire. Etc. But no nuclear fire on Camden.

The war is not going to get bogged down (except perhaps to an extent due to the weather).

So far the Ukrainians have been able to keep moving swiftly by passing Russian strong points and coming back to them from the rear.
Whether they will be able to keep doing this as the mud gets worse remains to be seen but they seem to have more and better kit than the Russians already and are better trained to use it.

wooliedyed said:

Some doom pron for @Leon. Here is what faces us in a nuclear confrontation
Putin has a load of battleground small yield stuff but max range 500km, its a Ukraine issue unless he reaches Germany.
Last source i can find has about 1700 warheads operational and deployed. 100 in heavy bombers, 1100 icbms silo based or on mobile launchers and just over 500 submarine launched.
Of the ICBMs, we dont know if the hypersonics are deployed yet, prob very few if so but the Satans are 10 warhead mirvs, each warhead 800kt max yield. City killers. Hes got 460 of those warheads or 46 missiles. Hes got another 160 single warhead 800kt and 180 400kt warheads on 30 x 6 warhead mirvs. 230 or so 100kt and all 500 sub are 100 kt or 50kt but can be fitted with bigger yields
The 100 heavy bombers have whatever fat load he wants to dump
Pick out of that whats rusted, dysfunctional, gets intercepted, is destroyed on the ground or is stuck at sub base.

Anotger 3000 warheads awaiting decommisioning but after a general exchange who is left to arrange getting them out and reconditioning?

In 1983 they had 35,000, 25,000 long range etc

What I'm struggling to understand is how their conventional military is so ropey and their nuclear capability is so vast? Does it really add up?

This thread has just been annexed by Putin

stodge said:

Gardenwalker said:

Stodge was a LibDem once I believe.
He seems to have gone on quite a journey.

Stodge still is a Lib Dem - doesn't mean I've lost the capacity to think about some of these issues.

I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong to tax wealth - I'm simply trying to argue the practicalities.

The current lunacy ends with brutal spending cuts which will affect more people more profoundly than is generally realised yet how do we get ourselves back into some form of balance in the public finances?

We can't and shouldn't keep borrowing - the alternatives bluntly are raising more revenue or reducing expenditure. Given all the calls on the State, the former is the obvious option but no one wants or would support the kind of tax rises on income that would make any difference.

There is a lot of wealth in a lot of different forms - how can or should you tax that and what are the implications if you do?

1. Scrap council tax and do a 2% annual property tax already, payable by estates or on sale if you can’t pay in the year.

2. Inheritance tax at 20% for all non property assets.

Luckyguy1983 said:

darkage said:

Leon said:

Casino_Royale said:

Nigelb said:

wooliedyed said:

williamglenn said:

wooliedyed said:

NorthofStoke said:

Who is the unity candidate for Tory party MPs realising that they face certain disaster at the polls unless Truss is replaced. They would have a year to 18 months to turn things around. Cometh the hour....

Probably Tugendhat, no known enemies

Tugendhat has one month's experience in government. It would be crazy to make him leader. The only 'safe pair of hands' options would be May or possibly Hunt.

He's about the only proper unity candidate though.
Hunt is just too far from the Spartans etc to hold it together i think, hes yesterdays man
May is possible, yes, but would be 'take us gently into the twilight' leader for the Tories

I reckon Wallace would do it if it came to it.
But not without Sunak as Chancellor.

Wallace/ Sunak would be a gamechanger.

I'd pound the streets for that.

Sunak has been entirely vindicated. What he said in the debates has come true

Sacking Truss and installing him might actually show the markets that the government gets it. So it has to be him, with someone else? Mordaunt? Hunt? Wallace?

Sunak as PM and Mordaunt or May as CoE?

It's not going to save the election but it would steady the ship of state...

Again the Tories have three choices: sack Truss, back Truss, or call a GE. One of those three. Choose, you fucks, end this turmoil

I don't think that the 'turmoil' can actually be ended, there are too many difficult external problems. What we need is someone with the appropriate temperament and judgement to be PM. Truss has proved already to be not up to the task.

Based on the evidence we have, that's not true. Truss set out her policy programme, and is implementing it. She defended her approach well at PMQs, actually answering her questions, and she has defended her policies in back to back interviews, where again, she pauses (clearly the crime of the century), thinks about her answer, and gives a proper answer. She's already withstood more political and media headwinds than Boris did at any one time in his miserable Prime Ministerial career, and not given an inch. It cannot be easy with every fat-arsed jelly-spined middle aged middle class twat, including the so-called Tories, joining the remoaner backing singers in the chorus for her to go, and bugger me if it doesn't make me want to support her all the more.

Well, what I am seeing is this. She set out a policy programme, yes (the growth plan) which went down like a bucket of sick and then she disappeared for 5 days, allowing the narrative to take hold that the government 'were borrowing money to fund a 5% tax cut for the extremely rich', and whilst the markets went in to chaos, and people found out that their mortgages "would be increasing by £10,000 per year" due to a rise in interest rates that she denied would happen a few weeks before, branding it 'project fear'.

The substantive policy, 'investment zones' are another variant of a familiar theme, 'enterprise zones', which came about in the 80's (with some success) then again in the 10's ('enterprise zones') and 20's (freeports), the latter being vague shadows of real meaningful things that happened in the past. The latest version has been invented in about 5 minutes, involving tax breaks (ok but then what happens to the tax reciepts?) and vague ideas about tearing up planning rules which in turns out aren't really being torn up, because she has confirmed that government planning policies will still apply, as is always the case.

There is nothing substantive in any of this. It is all a load of bullsh*t. I normally vote conservative in the hope that politicians will deliver a kind of benign incompetence, like we got from Theresa May and to a lesser extent, Boris Johnson. But Liz Truss comes across to me as mad and dangerous. The danger with Truss is greater even than with the Labour party, particularly with Starmer leading it. This is born out by the real "evidence", the recent polling results, which show a massive switch to labour.

For Putin, is it all about the domestic audience? He's annexed these four 'regions' but for what? Who is going to recognise it? Almost no-one I imagine. They barely control half of Donetsk. And as for Zaporizhzhia, you might as well annex Leicestershire without capturing Leicester. Whilst we in the west are outraged I wonder if some parts of the world are laughing.

Couldn't help noticing this evening that the latest US aid package to Ukraine takes the total aid to $65bn. With dollar-pound parity, that's exactly what the BoE is spending to clean up Truss and Kwarteng's vomit, isn't it?

That puts a horrifyingly stark spin on their idiocy, in my view.

ping said:

The LDI DB pensions scandal could well turn into something eerily similar to Major’s ERM fiasco. Potentially even worse, actually. Taxpayers pumping in good money after bad to stop them going insolvent.

The taxpayer is backstoping a gigantic bet on long term gilt yields reducing or at least stabilising after the BoE’s special monetary operation ends.

What if they don’t? What if yields resume their previous trajectory? What if there are no buyers? Where the hell does that leave us?

This could really fuck the country over.

The government isn’t taking that bet.

Worst case it holds to maturity so has just inflated the money supply

rcs1000 said:

I cannot believe this is real.

A government boasting of spending 6.5% of GDP on energy subsidies. That's insane.

“our government (Conservative government) is boasting how much money it is wasting PAYING FUELS BILLS OF THOSE WHO COULD AFFORD IT at the same time threatening a brutal spending round where benefits may not be protected from inflation.”

Is the penny dropping now? The reason why this policy is going ahead is so politicians can boast about a regressive policy giving everyone a hand out. Lazy unimaginative leadership, from all the political parties not just Team Truss, the flaws in this policy have been given too easy a ride, Labour and Lib Dems silent on this cause it was their idea the Tories stole, where was the criticism of the thinking of this “advert” at conference? so it is a disgrace for Labour and Lib Dems too not properly holding the government to account - without a doubt in my mind, our political parties have put party ahead of country with this policy.

PBers won’t properly accept the faults or consider the alternatives either - at very least improvements can be made imo - because there is something in it for PBers and their good economic sense has been bought off by the handout.