I'm sorry Faiza Shaheen is sad to not be the candidate but her defence for liking an anti-Semitic Tweet seems to be that we can't trust her to not like random Tweets on Twitter.
Is that much of an excuse, really?
Didn’t the “anti-Semitic” tweet simply reference the fact that Israel seeks to weaponise the charge of anti-Semitism itself?
If so, this is surely just common knowledge.
I’d have thought and hoped that her suspension was founded on her seeming support for the Greens.
I'd be curious to see if anyone has done a wealth analysis of Brexit versus Remain voters.
Given the age differential where young people were more likely to be pro-Remain and old people more likely to be pro-Leave, it wouldn't remotely surprise me if rather than people voting Leave because they were treated "unfairly" or "disadvantaged" . . . I wouldn't be surprised if Leave voters were disproportionately more likely to own their own home and more likely to be well off than Remain voters.
1) We’re talking about their perception not their reality; and
2) The folk who felt disenfranchised weren’t all, or even necessarily most, Brexit voters but they got it over the line.
You’re right that the Brexit vote was a wide ranging, and now dispersed coalition. But that group, many of whom didn’t vote before Brexit and Boris, are still there to be won, and capable of pushing a party into a majority. A lot voted for Boris (and it was Boris, not the Tories) in 2019. Some might vote Labour this time but many won’t vote I expect. But they will make their voices heard again one day if they don’t see change.
We’ll see if I am right in the post-election voting analysis.
Since that group were a dispersed coalition they're not capable of pushing a party into a majority, especially today.
In a binary choice you get people of completely different views voting for the same thing, for totally different reasons.
In a general election you don't.
People have moved on. Brexit is done, its history, its not a thing today any more than WWII or the Vietnam War or the Corn Laws are.
Deal with the concerns people have today and that's how you get a majority, not raking over old concerns.
Except Brexit is still is a concern as it continues to slowly drag our economy down, we could certainly do with that 4% GDP every year to solve the myriad problems voters say they are concerned about.
The idea that we would miraculously add 4% to our GDP every year by rejoining is dodgier than the £350m a week claim on the infamous bus.
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
@BatteryCorrectHorse Which moderate MP are you thinking of because I'm drawing a blank? There was Kelvin Hopkins who was still suspended at the calling of GE19 and wasn't allowed to stand but he was a Corbyn supporter, there's Simon Danczuk but that was 2017, I think the one you might be thinking of was Jas Athwal who wasn't an MP and was up against Sam Tarry for the Ilford South seat but suspended on the eve of the selection meeting.
I'm sorry Faiza Shaheen is sad to not be the candidate but her defence for liking an anti-Semitic Tweet seems to be that we can't trust her to not like random Tweets on Twitter.
Is that much of an excuse, really?
Didn’t the “anti-Semitic” tweet simply reference the fact that Israel seeks to weaponise the charge of anti-Semitism itself?
If so, this is surely just common knowledge.
I’d have thought and hoped that her suspension was founded on her seeming support for the Greens.
The Israel lobby influences policy in various ways, but while people focus on campaign contributions, I don't think it's the main mechanism. If you ask me, this video perfectly illustrates how it more often works, which is far more mundane.
Basically, every time you say something even mildly critical of Israel, you're immediately assailed by scores of hysterical people who explain to you why you're completely wrong, how you're biased against Israel, more or less explicitly accuse you of antisemitism, etc. and it just never stops.
Moreover, you can't easily ignore them, because those are not just random people, they tend to be friends or people who move in the same circles as you. Those people are mobilized by professional organizations, but to a large extent, that is organic.
This nonstop harassment is just exhausting and, since most people don't really care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they'll usually stop talking about it or, if they're a politician, do whatever those people want them to do, rather than having to put up with it because in the end it doesn't cost them much.
Only 5 more weeks and a day of this bullshit to endure
#justkiddin'
5 weeks?
You will be out there for fifty-seven years. What will happen is, you drift right through the core systems, and it's really just blind luck that a deep salvage team finds you when they do. It's one in a thousand, really. I think you're damn lucky to be alive, Sunil. You could be floating out there forever.
I admire your ambition in thinking you can out-nerd Sunil. Many have tried...
I'd be curious to see if anyone has done a wealth analysis of Brexit versus Remain voters.
Given the age differential where young people were more likely to be pro-Remain and old people more likely to be pro-Leave, it wouldn't remotely surprise me if rather than people voting Leave because they were treated "unfairly" or "disadvantaged" . . . I wouldn't be surprised if Leave voters were disproportionately more likely to own their own home and more likely to be well off than Remain voters.
1) We’re talking about their perception not their reality; and
2) The folk who felt disenfranchised weren’t all, or even necessarily most, Brexit voters but they got it over the line.
You’re right that the Brexit vote was a wide ranging, and now dispersed coalition. But that group, many of whom didn’t vote before Brexit and Boris, are still there to be won, and capable of pushing a party into a majority. A lot voted for Boris (and it was Boris, not the Tories) in 2019. Some might vote Labour this time but many won’t vote I expect. But they will make their voices heard again one day if they don’t see change.
We’ll see if I am right in the post-election voting analysis.
Since that group were a dispersed coalition they're not capable of pushing a party into a majority, especially today.
In a binary choice you get people of completely different views voting for the same thing, for totally different reasons.
In a general election you don't.
People have moved on. Brexit is done, its history, its not a thing today any more than WWII or the Vietnam War or the Corn Laws are.
Deal with the concerns people have today and that's how you get a majority, not raking over old concerns.
Except Brexit is still is a concern as it continues to slowly drag our economy down, we could certainly do with that 4% GDP every year to solve the myriad problems voters say they are concerned about.
Except that's total bovine manure. There is no 4% GDP every year.
We're about to put an end to this Tory period of government that began in 2010 and since 2010 the UK has grown faster than the Eurozone. Both in aggregate and per capita. "Despite Brexit" happening in that period.
The idea we would have grown even faster than them by another 4% GDP every year had we voted differently in a referendum is total unmitigated bullshit. Which is why other than extremists, everyone else has moved on already.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
The arguments for and against the lab leak theory are in the debate itself. This article summarises the arguments so we don't have to watch the full thirty plus hours. The question is whether the summary is accurate. It is certainly detailed.
Ultimately we have to make up our own minds based on the evidence. The issue with the way it's discussed on PB is that we don't agree on what the evidence is, let alone the interpretation of it. The usefulness of the rootclaim debate is that it collates the evidence that people informed on the subject think is important. I am doubtful about the Bayesian rationales.
The "Bayesian" stuff is people making up numbers and saying that's their prior, and the prior fits their conclusions pretty neatly. It can't be taken seriously. I can't think of a field of knowledge where Bayesian reasoning plays a big role.
If I gave you an example, you would have to update your observation from its initial estimate to an updated, more accurate version.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
But what you're mostly describing is the time lag between wholesale energy prices and retail:
The price of wholesale electricity has dropped massively since its peak, but because of government measures that suppressed the peak (i.e, the cap), the distribution companies are all still clawing back what they lost. That will change.
We're a business. No government cap for us, although fortunately we were in a 3 year contract across the worst of the madness. It does also mean that the prices are competitive now, it's a fairly free marketplace and a supplier that tried to claw back previous losses would just get wiped out by others undercutting it.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
The standing charge covers A LOT of things, not just net zero.
Indeed, a large chunk of your current standing charge is paying back the bailouts of energy companies that went bust during the peak.
Another chunk is paid directly to fossil fuel power stations, in the form of capacity payments.
Another chunk is because there was (as has happened with Thames Water) serious underinvestment in the grid, and now they're playing catchup as they replace a whole bunch of transformers.
And yes, some is Net Zero related. But a lot less than you'd expect.
I'll give you some of that, but capacity payments to fossil fuel providers are definitely part of the net zero costs - we wouldn't need to pay for a load of power stations to stand idle if we weren't giving renewables preferential grid access, and also having to hang on to enough dispatchable power to keep the lights on when the wind drops.
I'd be curious to see if anyone has done a wealth analysis of Brexit versus Remain voters.
Given the age differential where young people were more likely to be pro-Remain and old people more likely to be pro-Leave, it wouldn't remotely surprise me if rather than people voting Leave because they were treated "unfairly" or "disadvantaged" . . . I wouldn't be surprised if Leave voters were disproportionately more likely to own their own home and more likely to be well off than Remain voters.
1) We’re talking about their perception not their reality; and
2) The folk who felt disenfranchised weren’t all, or even necessarily most, Brexit voters but they got it over the line.
You’re right that the Brexit vote was a wide ranging, and now dispersed coalition. But that group, many of whom didn’t vote before Brexit and Boris, are still there to be won, and capable of pushing a party into a majority. A lot voted for Boris (and it was Boris, not the Tories) in 2019. Some might vote Labour this time but many won’t vote I expect. But they will make their voices heard again one day if they don’t see change.
We’ll see if I am right in the post-election voting analysis.
Since that group were a dispersed coalition they're not capable of pushing a party into a majority, especially today.
In a binary choice you get people of completely different views voting for the same thing, for totally different reasons.
In a general election you don't.
People have moved on. Brexit is done, its history, its not a thing today any more than WWII or the Vietnam War or the Corn Laws are.
Deal with the concerns people have today and that's how you get a majority, not raking over old concerns.
Except Brexit is still is a concern as it continues to slowly drag our economy down, we could certainly do with that 4% GDP every year to solve the myriad problems voters say they are concerned about.
The idea that we would miraculously add 4% to our GDP every year by rejoining is dodgier than the £350m a week claim on the infamous bus.
I was trying to find out what our GDP growth rate was in recent years, but I suspect it was fairly low. But given global trends wouldn't adding 4% on to that put us up among the higher echelons of economies in the world?
Which would be nice, but given the Eurozone has had its own issues, seems unrealistic.
It’s not that great, however politicians don’t have the capacity to vet everyone they meet on the campaign trail. This is something that could happen to anyone in any party it just tends to cause more problems for parties that are waning.
I'm doing a little 'guess the seat totals' for some work colleagues and providing a spreadsheet for them to fill in. I've had to explain to most that Northern Ireland exists. I've had to explain to a few that Scotland and Wales also exist.
Do we expect Alba to win any seats at all? I can't see it, but can't be sure?
My form has Con, Lab, LD, Green (all three UK parties as one), Reform, SNP, Plaid, DUP, UUP, SDLP, Sinn Fein and Alliance (and speaker autocompleted). Could any other party realistically get a seat?
Can't see Hanvey winning in Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy or MacAskill in Lothian East, they are both on very slim SNP majorities against Labour so any split in the pro-Indy vote will lead to Labour gain. On paper their best chance maybe Dundee Central, the notionals have SNP 55%, Lab 24%, Con 12%, LD 6% and Alba is pro-Indy without SNP baggage so maybe? It's a new constituency so that the SNP candidate is only the incumbent for 60% of the seat, that's all the positives.
Offsetting that was the fact the Alba candidate was an SNP councillor from 2007 to 2022 and then failed badly as an Alba candidate. First preferences 184 votes out of 5,843 and 2nd to be excluded. If you can only get 3.2% of the first preference in a ward you've served for 15 years it's not a good sign.
I'd be curious to see if anyone has done a wealth analysis of Brexit versus Remain voters.
Given the age differential where young people were more likely to be pro-Remain and old people more likely to be pro-Leave, it wouldn't remotely surprise me if rather than people voting Leave because they were treated "unfairly" or "disadvantaged" . . . I wouldn't be surprised if Leave voters were disproportionately more likely to own their own home and more likely to be well off than Remain voters.
1) We’re talking about their perception not their reality; and
2) The folk who felt disenfranchised weren’t all, or even necessarily most, Brexit voters but they got it over the line.
You’re right that the Brexit vote was a wide ranging, and now dispersed coalition. But that group, many of whom didn’t vote before Brexit and Boris, are still there to be won, and capable of pushing a party into a majority. A lot voted for Boris (and it was Boris, not the Tories) in 2019. Some might vote Labour this time but many won’t vote I expect. But they will make their voices heard again one day if they don’t see change.
We’ll see if I am right in the post-election voting analysis.
Since that group were a dispersed coalition they're not capable of pushing a party into a majority, especially today.
In a binary choice you get people of completely different views voting for the same thing, for totally different reasons.
In a general election you don't.
People have moved on. Brexit is done, its history, its not a thing today any more than WWII or the Vietnam War or the Corn Laws are.
Deal with the concerns people have today and that's how you get a majority, not raking over old concerns.
Except Brexit is still is a concern as it continues to slowly drag our economy down, we could certainly do with that 4% GDP every year to solve the myriad problems voters say they are concerned about.
The idea that we would miraculously add 4% to our GDP every year by rejoining is dodgier than the £350m a week claim on the infamous bus.
Bullshit that's been proven vs. Bullshit that's yet to be proven. Two can play at that game.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
So explain to me, for I am clearly simple minded, why has the cost of actual electricity per unit (thus linked to gas prices) has merely doubled in five years, but the network costs (standing charge, capacity charges etc) become 6x what it was 5 years ago?
For our site at it's current usage, for every 23p we pay in unit costs for electricity, we pay another 12p in network costs.
It's the additional network cost that's crippling, rather than the increase in unit cost (unit cost is down from 30.9p, two and a half years ago however all the savings are swallowed by the increases in the standing charge) and that increased network cost is basically all thanks to net zero.
Incidentally, our business uses literally tons of LPG gas - the price of which has only gone up 50% since the energy crisis started, and maybe 60% over 5 years, unlike our electricity bill which is 300% up over 5 years.
There is something making UK electricity terribly expensive compared to other sources of energy, and it's not increases in the cost of fuel.
Because the network is straining in its capacity to the limit, which is why capacity charges have gone up. When things are running at capacity they get more expensive.
The grid needs major investment at boosting capacity. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much your capacity charges are going on actually boosting capacity rather than just milking the existing network for what its worth.
EDIT: And yes what others have said about the costs going to bailout those who went bust due to gas prices going up. Which again is an issue you can blame on the fact we were burning gas rather than net zero, those costs wouldn't have been an issue had we already decarbonised when this happened.
The transmittion network isn't anywhere near being strained to the limit. UK electric demand has fallen pretty much every year since 2005. The only areas where the grid is under strain are related to the decision to stop generating electricity in power stations fairly near where it's used, and instead import it long distances from offshore windfarms - i.e. net zero costs.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
But what you're mostly describing is the time lag between wholesale energy prices and retail:
The price of wholesale electricity has dropped massively since its peak, but because of government measures that suppressed the peak (i.e, the cap), the distribution companies are all still clawing back what they lost. That will change.
We're a business. No government cap for us, although fortunately we were in a 3 year contract across the worst of the madness. It does also mean that the prices are competitive now, it's a fairly free marketplace and a supplier that tried to claw back previous losses would just get wiped out by others undercutting it.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
The standing charge covers A LOT of things, not just net zero.
Indeed, a large chunk of your current standing charge is paying back the bailouts of energy companies that went bust during the peak.
Another chunk is paid directly to fossil fuel power stations, in the form of capacity payments.
Another chunk is because there was (as has happened with Thames Water) serious underinvestment in the grid, and now they're playing catchup as they replace a whole bunch of transformers.
And yes, some is Net Zero related. But a lot less than you'd expect.
I'll give you some of that, but capacity payments to fossil fuel providers are definitely part of the net zero costs - we wouldn't need to pay for a load of power stations to stand idle if we weren't giving renewables preferential grid access, and also having to hang on to enough dispatchable power to keep the lights on when the wind drops.
Yes we would, we need demand to be able to surge at moments of peak demand and always have done. Demand isn't even across the day, the stereotype used to be that the end of Eastenders would see a massive surge in demand as people across the country put the kettle on.
We need capacity to meet surges in demand, or we'd have blackouts and failures during those surges instead. Nothing to do with Net Zero.
As we transition to having more batteries and energy storage, an alternative method of smoothing out such peaks and troughs may be available, but until then capacity needs to meet the peak but only for a few moments a day.
At the end of the day the obvious impartials were excluded from the jury, they all sat through it for 5 weeks apparently paying close attention, the case is a bit complicated, and it is what it is. Trump having successfully derailed all his other more serious cases makes this one depressingly significant, but if they hang, such is life.
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
@BatteryCorrectHorse Which moderate MP are you thinking of because I'm drawing a blank? There was Kelvin Hopkins who was still suspended at the calling of GE19 and wasn't allowed to stand but he was a Corbyn supporter, there's Simon Danczuk but that was 2017, I think the one you might be thinking of was Jas Athwal who wasn't an MP and was up against Sam Tarry for the Ilford South seat but suspended on the eve of the selection meeting.
What factionalism gives you, factionalism takes away, but I don't think that Corbyn had anything to do with derailing Athwal. I think you need to look closer to home for the movers.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
So explain to me, for I am clearly simple minded, why has the cost of actual electricity per unit (thus linked to gas prices) has merely doubled in five years, but the network costs (standing charge, capacity charges etc) become 6x what it was 5 years ago?
For our site at it's current usage, for every 23p we pay in unit costs for electricity, we pay another 12p in network costs.
It's the additional network cost that's crippling, rather than the increase in unit cost (unit cost is down from 30.9p, two and a half years ago however all the savings are swallowed by the increases in the standing charge) and that increased network cost is basically all thanks to net zero.
Incidentally, our business uses literally tons of LPG gas - the price of which has only gone up 50% since the energy crisis started, and maybe 60% over 5 years, unlike our electricity bill which is 300% up over 5 years.
There is something making UK electricity terribly expensive compared to other sources of energy, and it's not increases in the cost of fuel.
Because the network is straining in its capacity to the limit, which is why capacity charges have gone up. When things are running at capacity they get more expensive.
The grid needs major investment at boosting capacity. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much your capacity charges are going on actually boosting capacity rather than just milking the existing network for what its worth.
EDIT: And yes what others have said about the costs going to bailout those who went bust due to gas prices going up. Which again is an issue you can blame on the fact we were burning gas rather than net zero, those costs wouldn't have been an issue had we already decarbonised when this happened.
The transmittion network isn't anywhere near being strained to the limit. UK electric demand has fallen pretty much every year since 2005. The only areas where the grid is under strain are related to the decision to stop generating electricity in power stations fairly near where it's used, and instead import it long distances from offshore windfarms - i.e. net zero costs.
That could be a fair comment, though considering my car used to be regularly covered in soot from driving past Fiddlers Ferry coal power station and now Fiddlers Ferry is decommissioned the soot is gone, then I'm not regretting the lack of coal power plants near us. We need to improve the grids capacity where it is needed.
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
@BatteryCorrectHorse Which moderate MP are you thinking of because I'm drawing a blank? There was Kelvin Hopkins who was still suspended at the calling of GE19 and wasn't allowed to stand but he was a Corbyn supporter, there's Simon Danczuk but that was 2017, I think the one you might be thinking of was Jas Athwal who wasn't an MP and was up against Sam Tarry for the Ilford South seat but suspended on the eve of the selection meeting.
What factionalism gives you, factionalism takes away, but I don't think that Corbyn had anything to do with derailing Athwal. I think you need to look closer to home for the movers.
It does look like more of a local squabble to be fair, one which got a bit dirty.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
I'm doing a little 'guess the seat totals' for some work colleagues and providing a spreadsheet for them to fill in. I've had to explain to most that Northern Ireland exists. I've had to explain to a few that Scotland and Wales also exist.
Do we expect Alba to win any seats at all? I can't see it, but can't be sure?
My form has Con, Lab, LD, Green (all three UK parties as one), Reform, SNP, Plaid, DUP, UUP, SDLP, Sinn Fein and Alliance (and speaker autocompleted). Could any other party realistically get a seat?
Can't see Hanvey winning in Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy or MacAskill in Lothian East, they are both on very slim SNP majorities against Labour so any split in the pro-Indy vote will lead to Labour gain. On paper their best chance maybe Dundee Central, the notionals have SNP 55%, Lab 24%, Con 12%, LD 6% and Alba is pro-Indy without SNP baggage so maybe? It's a new constituency so that the SNP candidate is only the incumbent for 60% of the seat, that's all the positives.
Offsetting that was the fact the Alba candidate was an SNP councillor from 2007 to 2022 and then failed badly as an Alba candidate. First preferences 184 votes out of 5,843 and 2nd to be excluded. If you can only get 3.2% of the first preference in a ward you've served for 15 years it's not a good sign.
So on balance - yeah, no chance.
You don’t even have to worry about balance, Alba will be down to one elected* member on 5th July.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
McDonnell might have been more dangerous than Corbyn but he was a hell of a lot more pragmatic and decent at leadership. I am under no doubt he'd have won in 2017.
It was him that tried to stop Labour from splitting in 2019 and despite what the liars on the left say, he was the one that pushed Labour to Remain.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
As Mayor of London certainly, but he never won a GLC election. Andrew McIntosh did that only to be deposed the day after the election - McDonnell knows what he's doing, it's not nice work but he is good at it.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
They will never ever provide anything other than cargo-cult Conservatism, will they...
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
But what you're mostly describing is the time lag between wholesale energy prices and retail:
The price of wholesale electricity has dropped massively since its peak, but because of government measures that suppressed the peak (i.e, the cap), the distribution companies are all still clawing back what they lost. That will change.
We're a business. No government cap for us, although fortunately we were in a 3 year contract across the worst of the madness. It does also mean that the prices are competitive now, it's a fairly free marketplace and a supplier that tried to claw back previous losses would just get wiped out by others undercutting it.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
The standing charge covers A LOT of things, not just net zero.
Indeed, a large chunk of your current standing charge is paying back the bailouts of energy companies that went bust during the peak.
Another chunk is paid directly to fossil fuel power stations, in the form of capacity payments.
Another chunk is because there was (as has happened with Thames Water) serious underinvestment in the grid, and now they're playing catchup as they replace a whole bunch of transformers.
And yes, some is Net Zero related. But a lot less than you'd expect.
I'll give you some of that, but capacity payments to fossil fuel providers are definitely part of the net zero costs - we wouldn't need to pay for a load of power stations to stand idle if we weren't giving renewables preferential grid access, and also having to hang on to enough dispatchable power to keep the lights on when the wind drops.
Yes we would, we need demand to be able to surge at moments of peak demand and always have done. Demand isn't even across the day, the stereotype used to be that the end of Eastenders would see a massive surge in demand as people across the country put the kettle on.
We need capacity to meet surges in demand, or we'd have blackouts and failures during those surges instead. Nothing to do with Net Zero.
As we transition to having more batteries and energy storage, an alternative method of smoothing out such peaks and troughs may be available, but until then capacity needs to meet the peak but only for a few moments a day.
We used to have a little bit of fast reacting peak lopping infrastructure - mostly open cycle gas turbines (and Dinorwic/Ffestiniog). We didn't need all that much as the system sat on a baseload of coal/nuclear and you could spool the CCGT plants up and down a bit to fill in some of the more predictable gaps, before using the peak loppers to fill in the rest.
Thanks to net zero, we now have to have enough infrastructure available at short notice to cover all the old coal baseload as well as the other stuff, and we've got to be able to maintain it for days on end (Dinorwic is good, but once the water is in the bottom lake, it's game over until you've some spare electric to pump it back up again). This has largely been done, mainly by installing warehouses full of gas piston engine gensets all over the place. I know quite a lot about this, having been involved with the installation of them on a few sites (I can also spot one of these sites by walking past - it's supprising how many there are. To most people they just look like industrial buildings, but once you know what the external cooler groups and exhaust stacks look like they are easy enough to spot). This has not been a cheap exercise, and it's all in my electricity bill standing charge somewhere.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
As Mayor of London certainly, but he never won a GLC election. Andrew McIntosh did that only to be deposed the day after the election - McDonnell knows what he's doing, it's not nice work but he is good at it.
Reading Left Out, he was ruthless.
But he got Salisbury absolutely spot on and said that Labour lost the election as soon as Corbyn's idiotic statement came out.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
The arguments for and against the lab leak theory are in the debate itself. This article summarises the arguments so we don't have to watch the full thirty plus hours. The question is whether the summary is accurate. It is certainly detailed.
Ultimately we have to make up our own minds based on the evidence. The issue with the way it's discussed on PB is that we don't agree on what the evidence is, let alone the interpretation of it. The usefulness of the rootclaim debate is that it collates the evidence that people informed on the subject think is important. I am doubtful about the Bayesian rationales.
The "Bayesian" stuff is people making up numbers and saying that's their prior, and the prior fits their conclusions pretty neatly. It can't be taken seriously. I can't think of a field of knowledge where Bayesian reasoning plays a big role.
Then you have no idea what you are talking about. There are many areas where Bayesian theory/statistics/modelling/machine Learing/call it what you will has had a huge inpact on our lives. If you have a problem about people using the word Bayesian when it is inappropriate, then good for you, but don't criticise hammers because idiots want to drill a hole with a hammer.
I'm happy to say Bayesian reasoning plays a small role in a lot of fields. But in machine learning, for instance, one cannot say it is a big one.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
I wonder what would have happened if McDonnell had secured enough nominations when he ran against Gordon Brown.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
As Mayor of London certainly, but he never won a GLC election. Andrew McIntosh did that only to be deposed the day after the election - McDonnell knows what he's doing, it's not nice work but he is good at it.
Reading Left Out, he was ruthless.
But he got Salisbury absolutely spot on and said that Labour lost the election as soon as Corbyn's idiotic statement came out.
Corbyn was always a dangerous fool, Salisbury simply showed his true colours in a way that couldn't be plausibly denied.
Part of the problem in 2017 was boy who cried wolf syndrome. The Tories castigate every Labour leader as dangerous, so when a real dangerous leader was there in Corbyn, those threats were ignored. Then Salisbury happened and thank goodness that Corbyn was Opposition Leader and not Prime Minister.
The hypothetical parallel universe that makes me think that we dodged a bullet is what would have happened had the 2017 election been just one week later. Had the election been just one week later it would have been while Grenfell was ablaze - and I think then between May's campaign and having Grenfell as well, we might have ended up with PM Corbyn in that scenario.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
I wonder what would have happened if McDonnell had secured enough nominations when he ran against Gordon Brown.
I would have most likely been part of the McDonnell campaign so probably terribly. Realistically it would have been something like 10% of the affiliate vote, 4% of the PLP and 8% of the membership so about as well as Bryan Gould's result against John Smith in 1992.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
As Mayor of London certainly, but he never won a GLC election. Andrew McIntosh did that only to be deposed the day after the election - McDonnell knows what he's doing, it's not nice work but he is good at it.
Reading Left Out, he was ruthless.
But he got Salisbury absolutely spot on and said that Labour lost the election as soon as Corbyn's idiotic statement came out.
Corbyn was always a dangerous fool, Salisbury simply showed his true colours in a way that couldn't be plausibly denied.
Part of the problem in 2017 was boy who cried wolf syndrome. The Tories castigate every Labour leader as dangerous, so when a real dangerous leader was there in Corbyn, those threats were ignored. Then Salisbury happened and thank goodness that Corbyn was Opposition Leader and not Prime Minister.
The hypothetical parallel universe that makes me think that we dodged a bullet is what would have happened had the 2017 election been just one week later. Had the election been just one week later it would have been while Grenfell was ablaze - and I think then between May's campaign and having Grenfell as well, we might have ended up with PM Corbyn in that scenario.
The other problem was May's campaign was there is nothing wrong, keep calm and carry on. When huge portions of the country are no, we need change. Hence why Boris campaign was much more proactive, Get Brexit Done, Level Up the Country etc.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
McDonnell is the only sensible member. He understood how to win, Jezza ignored his advice.
He was a 1997 entrant, not someone left over from the 1980s, that might have been significant in terms of some pragmatism.
In Parliamentary terms that’s true but he was one of Livingstone’s praetorians in the GLC takeover. So McDonnell has deeper roots than his time in the Commons suggests.
Of course we forget that Livingstone did actually win an election.
As Mayor of London certainly, but he never won a GLC election. Andrew McIntosh did that only to be deposed the day after the election - McDonnell knows what he's doing, it's not nice work but he is good at it.
Reading Left Out, he was ruthless.
But he got Salisbury absolutely spot on and said that Labour lost the election as soon as Corbyn's idiotic statement came out.
Corbyn was always a dangerous fool, Salisbury simply showed his true colours in a way that couldn't be plausibly denied.
Part of the problem in 2017 was boy who cried wolf syndrome. The Tories castigate every Labour leader as dangerous, so when a real dangerous leader was there in Corbyn, those threats were ignored. Then Salisbury happened and thank goodness that Corbyn was Opposition Leader and not Prime Minister.
The hypothetical parallel universe that makes me think that we dodged a bullet is what would have happened had the 2017 election been just one week later. Had the election been just one week later it would have been while Grenfell was ablaze - and I think then between May's campaign and having Grenfell as well, we might have ended up with PM Corbyn in that scenario.
The other problem was May's campaign was there is nothing wrong, keep calm and carry on. When huge portions of the country are no, we need change. Hence why Boris campaign was much more proactive, Get Brexit Done, Level Up the Country etc.
That's a good point. If May had called the snap election sooner and campaigned in the style of her first Downing Street speech, she might have won the massive majority she wanted.
I presume this is due to sticking plaster on top of sticking plaster on top of sticking plaster from the original shit show of the infamous NHS IT scheme started 20 years ago. And again the its all about the culture of cover-up.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Some taxes will have to go up to eliminate the deficit and to pay down the huge debt. Paying £110bn a year on interest is not sustainable.
IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Some taxes will have to go up to eliminate the deficit and to pay down the huge debt. Paying £110bn a year on interest is not sustainable.
I just can't see the debt getting paid down. Servicing the debt is bad enough and debt levels are still rising.
I suspect we need to find huge gains in productivity and growth. And neither party is really addressing how they might achieve this. We have an unproductive economy and increasing numbers of (particularly young people) on the sick.
IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Some taxes will have to go up to eliminate the deficit and to pay down the huge debt. Paying £110bn a year on interest is not sustainable.
Even then, I suspect we need to find huge gains in productivity and growth. And neither party is really addressing how they might achieve this. We have an unproductive economy and increasing numbers of (particularly young people) on the sick.
Agreed, and I think we’ll never hear the word productivity once during the campaign.
High taxes, high immigration, high debt, low growth, low productivity, that is death spiral stuff. Needs the pilot to PULL UP, PULL UP...
The problem is we have had crazy Grandpa promises to sort this out by just nationalise everything and on the other side Truss proposing if we only just slash taxes across the board tomorrow that will fix it. Now, Labour are promising Tory-continued (to not rock the boat) and Tories are promising batshit irrelevant policies.
Even they may struggle to pin that one on Starmer.
It seems odd to use the front page just to plug its own podcast about the Lucan case. I wonder if it is using its first edition to hide a scoop from the other papers.
High taxes, high immigration, high debt, low growth, low productivity, that is death spiral stuff. Needs the pilot to PULL UP, PULL UP...
The problem is we have had crazy Grandpa promises to sort this out by just nationalise everything and on the other side Truss proposing if we only just slash taxes across the board tomorrow that will fix it. Now, Labour are promising Tory-continued (to not rock the boat) and Tories are promising batshit irrelevant policies.
Don’t blame the pilots for 'a rapid change in gravitational force'.
Even they may struggle to pin that one on Starmer.
It seems odd to use the front page just to plug its own podcast about the Lucan case. I wonder if it is using its first edition to hide a scoop from the other papers.
Or the Mail have just given up on fighting the resistance and now its distraction time from the GE.
Also, there are also already protections in place, but they can be bypassed. The problem is if you go too far, no legitimate phone can ever be resold / traded-in.
Another evolution of the nicked phone crime isn't even primarily about the phone itself, rather it is access to things like email, online banking apps. If people haven't been careful about how they setup their banking apps it is very easy for the accounts to get drained.
Another evolution of the nicked phone crime isn't even primarily about the phone itself, rather it is access to things like email, online banking apps. If people haven't been careful about how they setup their banking apps it is very easy for the accounts to get drained.
Why not just have MI5 proscribe the Socialist Campaign Group when he takes over and be done with it?
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
My head canon says that if he had stood instead of Corbyn, he would have won (see also Bernie Sanders)
That's why he had no chance of getting the nominations. MPs lent their nominations to ensure a token left-winger was on the ballot (David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott in 2010, Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan nominated Corbyn in 2015). McDonnell was too dangerous to get allowed near the ballot.
I wonder what would have happened if McDonnell had secured enough nominations when he ran against Gordon Brown.
I would have most likely been part of the McDonnell campaign so probably terribly. Realistically it would have been something like 10% of the affiliate vote, 4% of the PLP and 8% of the membership so about as well as Bryan Gould's result against John Smith in 1992.
Basic problem McDonnell had - beyond nominations - is the same one that made him a much more formidable figure. The fact he's competent, has a reasonable intellect and comes to conclusions means he upsets fellow comrades in a way that a deliberately vague empty vessel like Jezza doesn't.
One reason Corbyn succeeded where other, far cleverer and more competent, far left figures failed is that it's precisely his Chauncey Gardiner dumbness that brought different groups - usually at odds - together.
His basic platform was 'socialism is good and cures all ills, let's have lots of it' without getting into the nitty-gritty of how and why that would work. A vagueness that came unstuck towards the end - as had to make decisions and some of the odder views were highlighted - but served him well for most of his leadership.
Which you could read anything into - from the radical anti-imperialist (or rather west) Marxism that was his lodestar pre-leadership, to being 'social democracy turned up to 11' that many supporters saw him as. Look at the vague fuzziness of 'supporting peace' while praising or excusing those who want the opposite, as long as they're anti-west.
Hence why lots of people who really should've known better supported him until it was too late did so and realised post-Salisbury, antisemitism scandal, and amid Brexit wars, they'd picked a dud.
McDonnell could not have done the same though as the mere act of intellectual honesty of what he wanted would've broken up or scared off that coalition that came together under Corbyn far earlier, if it would have coalesced at all. He wouldn't have been able to do the 'I'm just a humble man of peace' act when challenged on views on NATO for example, nor promised entirely contradictory economic paths.
There's a reason Corbyn was, for a time, successful. The same vacuousness while espousing vague 'socialism' that brought him down when people dug into past statements and interpreted what that might mean for themselves.
"Gareth now hopes his case can act as a catalyst to change the way people think about domestic abuse, when men are the victims.
"Hopefully, we can change the way the judicial system looks upon these kinds of cases as has shown with the verdict that has come out. I think that's vitally important on how we can try and move things forward as a society.
"I think it shows that it doesn't send a strong enough message. It shows that if you're a female abuser and you did commit such atrocities, you can still get away with things. It is vital that that is addressed within society, the more men that come forward and speak up about these things, that's the way we can have a true impact."
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
Diane Abbott. Is it just me who is not following this. Starmer says she is not barred. She says she is. The NEC has yet to make (or announce) a decision. Sue Gray is said to be concerned about the optics. Is the allegation that they are running down the clock?
The problem with this trap (and every presumptive Government gets caught in it) is that as soon as you say “I won’t raise tax X” you get asked “what about tax Y”? Go far enough down the alphabet and, not wanting to box yourself in, you demur. And then that’s the one the opposition come at you with. But you’re going to be the Government so you have to be responsible and you can’t rule them all out.
No idea what the answer is, every presumptive Government in my lifetime has been caught this way. Just like every Tory opposition gets caught with “what would you cut”?
I think that’s actually an easy No increase.
Because Labour are likely to lower the threshold at which you start having to charge VAT to say £40,000 while potentially lowering the rate by a percentage or 2.
Small sole traders worrying about VAT? Ouch.
Bet those small businessmen will be delighted to sign a letter supporting Labour next time.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I'm thinking of transferring my meagre pension pot to a SIPP. Heaven knows what I'll do with it there, but the current fund managers vary between losing money slowly and losing money quickly: £9,000 in the last year; £900 in the last seven days. I might also take the 25 per cent tax free and put it in the Chancellor's finest British bonds, or whatever they are called.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I'm thinking of transferring my meagre pension pot to a SIPP. Heaven knows what I'll do with it there, but the current fund managers vary between losing money slowly and losing money quickly: £9,000 in the last year; £900 in the last seven days. I might also take the 25 per cent tax free and put it in the Chancellor's finest British bonds, or whatever they are called.
Stick in a mixed tracker fund with a very low management charge, like in Vanguard.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I suggested a policy a while back - increase the state pension, but also increase tax on significant pension based wealth as it is being withdrawn. This way the 'pensioner lobby' which has such an impact on UK politics is split up as different parts of it have competing interests. No longer can the wealthy hide behind arguments that the preservation of the triple lock/state pension is essential to address poverty etc. The way in which private pension wealth is so untouched by tax is mystifying.
A brief message to say that I have no interest in Diane Abbot.
I know very little about her and what I do know I don’t care.
I’m politically interested so I suspect over 90%+ of the nation couldn’t care a less about this supposed News story of a fringe politician who represents an east London seat that 99%+ of the country have never visited. Maybe the “News” should be more focused on the gangland shooting in her seat last night.
The election campaign is as dull as I expected it to be, bar some tory mishaps and one mental policy.
Sorry to see Faiza Shaheen dropped as a Labour candidate .
Twitter seems to be the cause of many a downfall . And this of course means IDS could hang onto the seat ! So another reason to bemoan what’s happened !
As for Diane Abbott this seems a stupid self inflicted wound by Labour . What harm could she do if re-elected.
If there’s more to the story than what’s come out already then Labour should explain this .
As for her comments that landed her in trouble . It’s not exactly controversial to say that black people are more likely to suffer long term racism . You can’t hide your skin colour .
Diane Abbott. Is it just me who is not following this. Starmer says she is not barred. She says she is. The NEC has yet to make (or announce) a decision. Sue Gray is said to be concerned about the optics. Is the allegation that they are running down the clock?
The Lloyd Russel-Moyle case is kafkaesque to the point where it appears deliberately absurd. A 'serious allegation', unspecified, from 10 years ago, being made exactly now.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I suggested a policy a while back - increase the state pension, but also increase tax on significant pension based wealth as it is being withdrawn. This way the 'pensioner lobby' which has such an impact on UK politics is split up as different parts of it have competing interests. No longer can the wealthy hide behind arguments that the preservation of the triple lock/state pension is essential to address poverty etc. The way in which private pension wealth is so untouched by tax is mystifying.
Maybe. But remember the government has traditionally wanted to encourage saving, which presumably is why it invented ISAs and pensions in the first place. I'd prefer abolition of higher-rate tax relief on contributions, which favours the highly-paid. (Note, my own pension pot is not large.)
But I think what is more likely than any change to pension taxes is development of this government's ideas around encouraging pension funds to invest in Britain.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I'm thinking of transferring my meagre pension pot to a SIPP. Heaven knows what I'll do with it there, but the current fund managers vary between losing money slowly and losing money quickly: £9,000 in the last year; £900 in the last seven days. I might also take the 25 per cent tax free and put it in the Chancellor's finest British bonds, or whatever they are called.
Stick in a mixed tracker fund with a very low management charge, like in Vanguard.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I suggested a policy a while back - increase the state pension, but also increase tax on significant pension based wealth as it is being withdrawn. This way the 'pensioner lobby' which has such an impact on UK politics is split up as different parts of it have competing interests. No longer can the wealthy hide behind arguments that the preservation of the triple lock/state pension is essential to address poverty etc. The way in which private pension wealth is so untouched by tax is mystifying.
Maybe. But remember the government has traditionally wanted to encourage saving, which presumably is why it invented ISAs and pensions in the first place. I'd prefer abolition of higher-rate tax relief on contributions, which favours the highly-paid. (Note, my own pension pot is not large.)
But I think what is more likely than any change to pension taxes is development of this government's ideas around encouraging pension funds to invest in Britain.
However there should surely be a tighter cap on total ISAs, since it is only the richest who have been able to maximise their tax planning in this way.
Evening folks. An observation on social media campaigning in this election. Over that last couple of days I have had lots of FB posts from the Tory candidate in my reboundaried constituency in Lincolnshire. Judging by the spread of comments these are clearly going out to the general public like me rather than targetting supposed Tory faithful.
What has been amusing this evening is travelling by train from Newark to Aberdeen. All the way up there have been local FB messages from Tory candidates. Clearly CCHQ are putting a lot of effort into locally targeted social media campaigning. This culminated a few minutes ago with a FB message as I arrived in Aberdeen from the Aberdeen South Tory candidate with a classic 'only we can bestcthe SNP' bar chart.
I have to say I am surprised at the sophistication of the Tory social media campaign if not with their actual message.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
The arguments for and against the lab leak theory are in the debate itself. This article summarises the arguments so we don't have to watch the full thirty plus hours. The question is whether the summary is accurate. It is certainly detailed.
Ultimately we have to make up our own minds based on the evidence. The issue with the way it's discussed on PB is that we don't agree on what the evidence is, let alone the interpretation of it. The usefulness of the rootclaim debate is that it collates the evidence that people informed on the subject think is important. I am doubtful about the Bayesian rationales.
The "Bayesian" stuff is people making up numbers and saying that's their prior, and the prior fits their conclusions pretty neatly. It can't be taken seriously. I can't think of a field of knowledge where Bayesian reasoning plays a big role.
I was under the impression that Bayesian analysis is very important in a lot of fields, although I'm not an expert.
Applications for it crop up randomly all over the place.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
Luckily for Labour, the Tories will be prattling on about bringing back the cane and old style light bulbs with their core squeeze the Reform vote strategy, and Ed Davey will trying to juggle flaming torches just to try and get noticed.
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from 1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
What does connect, though, is the notion that the tories are the epitome of bad governance. Proper leadership, change management, coordination, implementation, planning and stability are absolutely key for organizational performance and the tories have provided the absolute opposite of that. If you want to see how the tories have run the country look no further than to how disorganised and amateurish their GE campaign has been, because it is the same thing. Money is not the be all and end all of market performance... look at Elon musk's takeover of Twitter... his abysmal leadership destroyed the company. In contrast, Steve Jobs approach saved Apple.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
Luckily for Labour, the Tories will be prattling on about bringing back the cane and old style light bulb with their core squeeze the Reform vote strategy, and Ed Davey will trying to juggle flaming torches just to try and get noticed.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps we are going to see Rishi as a canny political operator. At last.
(To be fair, it would be easier for him to show that to the British voters than to the bunch of idiot Tory MPs he inherited....)
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
What does connect, though, is the notion that the tories are the epitome of bad governance. Proper leadership, change management, coordination, implementation, planning and stability are absolutely key for organizational performance and the tories have provided the absolute opposite of that. If you want to see how the tories have run the country look no further than to how disorganised and amateurish their GE campaign has been, because it is the same thing. Money is not the be all and end all of market performance... look at Elon musk's takeover of Twitter... his abysmal leadership destroyed the company. In contrast, Steve Jobs approach saved Apple.
When has Labour ever delivered great governance?
Exhibit A: every Labour government has left office with more unemployed than it inherited.
Desperate talk from our last remaining resident tories on here this morning.
There’s no cut through and no interest. Even less so once the Euros start. Apart from some crass photo ops there has only been one news item (natty service) and that was negative for the tories.
The election was over before it began. There has been no movement in the polls. Labour landslide.
As I told you all would be the case two years ago, to much derision at the time.
Have a nice day and do something other than stare at echo chamber politics …
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
That seems the likely conclusion. Also tax the rich olds more.
I suggested a policy a while back - increase the state pension, but also increase tax on significant pension based wealth as it is being withdrawn. This way the 'pensioner lobby' which has such an impact on UK politics is split up as different parts of it have competing interests. No longer can the wealthy hide behind arguments that the preservation of the triple lock/state pension is essential to address poverty etc. The way in which private pension wealth is so untouched by tax is mystifying.
Maybe. But remember the government has traditionally wanted to encourage saving, which presumably is why it invented ISAs and pensions in the first place. I'd prefer abolition of higher-rate tax relief on contributions, which favours the highly-paid. (Note, my own pension pot is not large.)
But I think what is more likely than any change to pension taxes is development of this government's ideas around encouraging pension funds to invest in Britain.
However there should surely be a tighter cap on total ISAs, since it is only the richest who have been able to maximise their tax planning in this way.
There are occasional reports on ISA millionaires who got lucky picking shares but I'd not want to base a policy around just a handful of cases. The ISA maximum is £20,000 a year which should be affordable by middle-aged professionals who have cleared their mortgages. I guess the government's position is to encourage them to save rather than spend the money on an exotic holiday or new car. So the question is, will the next government wish to encourage savings in this way or would they rather it was spent. Again, as with pensions, one could imagine steps to direct investment to Britain rather than Tesla shares.
Starmer playing a risky game here. Many of those who are being replaced are popular in their constituencies, will the activists come out and campaign for their replacements as much?
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
The arguments for and against the lab leak theory are in the debate itself. This article summarises the arguments so we don't have to watch the full thirty plus hours. The question is whether the summary is accurate. It is certainly detailed.
Ultimately we have to make up our own minds based on the evidence. The issue with the way it's discussed on PB is that we don't agree on what the evidence is, let alone the interpretation of it. The usefulness of the rootclaim debate is that it collates the evidence that people informed on the subject think is important. I am doubtful about the Bayesian rationales.
The "Bayesian" stuff is people making up numbers and saying that's their prior, and the prior fits their conclusions pretty neatly. It can't be taken seriously. I can't think of a field of knowledge where Bayesian reasoning plays a big role.
I was under the impression that Bayesian analysis is very important in a lot of fields, although I'm not an expert.
Applications for it crop up randomly all over the place.
That’s not really true. When one crops up, it increases the likelihood of someone thinking of another.
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from 1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
Land owners aren’t exactly Labours target audience .
I accept though that quite a few of those who were sitting on the fence will find reasons to move back to the Tories . Sunak certainly needs a good debate performance next week . Starmer just needs to hammer the Tories on the NHS .
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
Luckily for Labour, the Tories will be prattling on about bringing back the cane and old style light bulbs with their core squeeze the Reform vote strategy, and Ed Davey will trying to juggle flaming torches just to try and get noticed.
It is a funny old election campaign. For a start, the government has announced more new policies than the opposition, raising the questions why the government has not already done them and what is the point of an opposition that will not do anything different?
Then there is what is not mentioned. Has Rishi highlighted the government's greatest achievement, on which referendums and elections were fought? No, he has not. And Starmer has two reasons not to mention 2019: Corbyn and Brexit.
So the election is being fought in a strange vacuum where recent history never happened.
Evening folks. An observation on social media campaigning in this election. Over that last couple of days I have had lots of FB posts from the Tory candidate in my reboundaried constituency in Lincolnshire. Judging by the spread of comments these are clearly going out to the general public like me rather than targetting supposed Tory faithful.
What has been amusing this evening is travelling by train from Newark to Aberdeen. All the way up there have been local FB messages from Tory candidates. Clearly CCHQ are putting a lot of effort into locally targeted social media campaigning. This culminated a few minutes ago with a FB message as I arrived in Aberdeen from the Aberdeen South Tory candidate with a classic 'only we can bestcthe SNP' bar chart.
I have to say I am surprised at the sophistication of the Tory social media campaign if not with their actual message.
So Rishi has stolen a march on the hapless Starmer with his snap election.
I was watching a Times Radio piece earlier.suggesting the Tory war chest is empty.
I don't think it will make much difference but it is the first election where I have noticed such organised targeted social media activity on constituency basis. I suspect it will become the norm for all parties going forward.
Rory on Trip on C4 last night said the Conservatives have already spent £800,000 on social media advertising (iirc).
Even they may struggle to pin that one on Starmer.
I know rather a lot about the Lucan story. My wife applied for the job as the nanny, but got another appointment. Or she could have been the one blugeoned to death.
Lucan himself almost certainly didn't do the deed, but rather employed someone to steal the family silver for the insurance, not knowing he had taken on a complete psychopath for the task.
One thing those who claim he did it never explain is how a man with a pathological fear of blood could have inflicted such terrible injuries.
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
What does connect, though, is the notion that the tories are the epitome of bad governance. Proper leadership, change management, coordination, implementation, planning and stability are absolutely key for organizational performance and the tories have provided the absolute opposite of that. If you want to see how the tories have run the country look no further than to how disorganised and amateurish their GE campaign has been, because it is the same thing. Money is not the be all and end all of market performance... look at Elon musk's takeover of Twitter... his abysmal leadership destroyed the company. In contrast, Steve Jobs approach saved Apple.
When has Labour ever delivered great governance?
Exhibit A: every Labour government has left office with more unemployed than it inherited.
Starmer has run a large organisation with success. And when I look at how efficiently their campaign is being rolled out I am actually hopeful. And if you want to look at good governance then look at the Blair years. You may not have liked his foreign policy, but domestically labour were very strong: longest unbroken period of growth in british history. NHS performance was second to none etc. People look back on those years with nostalgia now. I am just not buying your chicken little approach to labour... 1) the party you are scared of disappeared in the 70s and 80s, 2) the far left agitators and momentum types largely became popcons, erg and reform voters after 2010. Those idealistic radical voters are largely the torie's problem. Sure there is an old guard left, like abbott and corbyn) but they are marginalized, kicked out or simply at the end of the line due to old age. Just a few years ago 30p Lee was campaigning for eu hating corbyn you know.
Evening folks. An observation on social media campaigning in this election. Over that last couple of days I have had lots of FB posts from the Tory candidate in my reboundaried constituency in Lincolnshire. Judging by the spread of comments these are clearly going out to the general public like me rather than targetting supposed Tory faithful.
What has been amusing this evening is travelling by train from Newark to Aberdeen. All the way up there have been local FB messages from Tory candidates. Clearly CCHQ are putting a lot of effort into locally targeted social media campaigning. This culminated a few minutes ago with a FB message as I arrived in Aberdeen from the Aberdeen South Tory candidate with a classic 'only we can bestcthe SNP' bar chart.
I have to say I am surprised at the sophistication of the Tory social media campaign if not with their actual message.
So Rishi has stolen a march on the hapless Starmer with his snap election.
I was watching a Times Radio piece earlier.suggesting the Tory war chest is empty.
I don't think it will make much difference but it is the first election where I have noticed such organised targeted social media activity on constituency basis. I suspect it will become the norm for all parties going forward.
Rory on Trip on C4 last night said the Conservatives have already spent £800,000 on social media advertising (iirc).
Tell you what, labour's social media team is on fire. I really recommend following them. 🤣🤣🤣
I'm sorry Faiza Shaheen is sad to not be the candidate but her defence for liking an anti-Semitic Tweet seems to be that we can't trust her to not like random Tweets on Twitter.
Is that much of an excuse, really?
Didn’t the “anti-Semitic” tweet simply reference the fact that Israel seeks to weaponise the charge of anti-Semitism itself?
If so, this is surely just common knowledge.
I’d have thought and hoped that her suspension was founded on her seeming support for the Greens.
Diane Abbott. Is it just me who is not following this. Starmer says she is not barred. She says she is. The NEC has yet to make (or announce) a decision. Sue Gray is said to be concerned about the optics. Is the allegation that they are running down the clock?
The Lloyd Russel-Moyle case is kafkaesque to the point where it appears deliberately absurd. A 'serious allegation', unspecified, from 10 years ago, being made exactly now.
Yes, it is very convenient
One does not have to like him to realise this stinks.
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from 1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
There doesn’t appear to be much polling evidence of this phenomenon. I suppose you could see a scenario where there’s a sudden change in the poll numbers as doubts mount and hit a critical mass. Im not sure that concerns about Labour would push people back to the Tories, far more likely they’d find another repository for a non-Tory vote. No evidence of that yet but I could definitely see a situation where the polls move towards a more uncertain outcome. At the moment this just looks like a newspaper contriving a story to make things look more interesting.
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from 1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
Land owners aren’t exactly Labours target audience .
I accept though that quite a few of those who were sitting on the fence will find reasons to move back to the Tories . Sunak certainly needs a good debate performance next week . Starmer just needs to hammer the Tories on the NHS .
The economy is an interesting one, because here the gap is quite a bit narrower than I expected. Lots of undecided voters will note that SKS appears to want to glide into No.10 without telling anyone what he wants to do when he gets there. They will note that in the past he's said what he's needed to do to get elected, and then changed his tune after. They will be asking themselves the question:
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
They will come for your pension pot.
If that remotely becomes a narrative, sell Labour seats. It will be worse than Theresa May's campaign woes in 2017. And it is very easy for Rishi to say he won't come for your pension pot. How about you, Labour?
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
Best to stick with the Conservatives who are going to cut taxes without reducing current service levels.
They are both full of s***!
On the other hand if the odious Abbott can deliver one more Conservative Government, what can one do but laugh at the irony.
Diane Abbott. Is it just me who is not following this. Starmer says she is not barred. She says she is. The NEC has yet to make (or announce) a decision. Sue Gray is said to be concerned about the optics. Is the allegation that they are running down the clock?
The Lloyd Russel-Moyle case is kafkaesque to the point where it appears deliberately absurd. A 'serious allegation', unspecified, from 10 years ago, being made exactly now.
Yes, it is very convenient
One does not have to like him to realise this stinks.
Over the last few days, I have delivered a very large number of glossy 8-page leaflets in favour of my current MP, soon to be candidate. (Couldn't be delivered after midnight just gone - thanks for dumping those on us CCHQ, just before the election was announced!) As a result, I can report the following state of play in the nation's gardens:
Only 8 garden gnomes spotted (5 of those in one garden skewing the numbers, two more almost entirely buried in a raised bed)
Zero meerkats. They were quite the ubiqitous thing in 2017, on the wane by 2019, now seemingly extinct.
One unicorn.
Lots of pottery hedghogs.
Undoubtedly the best spot was two VERY LARGE elephants.
I am also astonished by the sheer number of small wellington boots some families have in their porch. Rainbows, Toy Story, unicorns, single vibrant colours. Rarely green or black.
[Memo to self: after the election, set up an online wellies store. The gaudier the stock in tiny sizes, the greater the possibilities...]
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from 1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
There doesn’t appear to be much polling evidence of this phenomenon. I suppose you could see a scenario where there’s a sudden change in the poll numbers as doubts mount and hit a critical mass. Im not sure that concerns about Labour would push people back to the Tories, far more likely they’d find another repository for a non-Tory vote. No evidence of that yet but I could definitely see a situation where the polls move towards a more uncertain outcome. At the moment this just looks like a newspaper contriving a story to make things look more interesting.
Be patient.
Lots of people are still undecided and many haven't tuned into the election yet, or made their minds up - which happens in the very final 1-3 weeks, and sometimes the last 48-72 hours.
The tories in this thread are flying on wishful thinking. Wow. That is not what I expected from a betting site 🤯🤯🤯🤯 you guys are moving imaginary armies around on a map.
Comments
If so, this is surely just common knowledge.
I’d have thought and hoped that her suspension was founded on her seeming support for the Greens.
https://labourlist.org/2022/10/athwal-selected-as-labour-candidate-in-ilford-south-beating-incumbent-tarry/
Basically, every time you say something even mildly critical of Israel, you're immediately assailed by scores of hysterical people who explain to you why you're completely wrong, how you're biased against Israel, more or less explicitly accuse you of antisemitism, etc. and it just never stops.
Moreover, you can't easily ignore them, because those are not just random people, they tend to be friends or people who move in the same circles as you. Those people are mobilized by professional organizations, but to a large extent, that is organic.
This nonstop harassment is just exhausting and, since most people don't really care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they'll usually stop talking about it or, if they're a politician, do whatever those people want them to do, rather than having to put up with it because in the end it doesn't cost them much.
https://x.com/phl43/status/1789653035456643277
[Tweet above]
We're about to put an end to this Tory period of government that began in 2010 and since 2010 the UK has grown faster than the Eurozone. Both in aggregate and per capita. "Despite Brexit" happening in that period.
The idea we would have grown even faster than them by another 4% GDP every year had we voted differently in a referendum is total unmitigated bullshit. Which is why other than extremists, everyone else has moved on already.
Which would be ironic...
Which would be nice, but given the Eurozone has had its own issues, seems unrealistic.
Offsetting that was the fact the Alba candidate was an SNP councillor from 2007 to 2022 and then failed badly as an Alba candidate. First preferences 184 votes out of 5,843 and 2nd to be excluded. If you can only get 3.2% of the first preference in a ward you've served for 15 years it's not a good sign.
So on balance - yeah, no chance.
Two can play at that game.
Speaking of, John McDonnell is very quiet thesedays.
We need capacity to meet surges in demand, or we'd have blackouts and failures during those surges instead. Nothing to do with Net Zero.
As we transition to having more batteries and energy storage, an alternative method of smoothing out such peaks and troughs may be available, but until then capacity needs to meet the peak but only for a few moments a day.
Now it's proving super tedious waiting for the inevitable.
New in PN: What you need to know about Trump's trial before the verdict
"Trump is asking jurors to believe multiple contradictory theories of the case. But Trumpland is reportedly pinning its hopes on one juror who appears sympathetic to the defense.
https://nitter.poast.org/atrupar/status/1795807522336448735#m
At the end of the day the obvious impartials were excluded from the jury, they all sat through it for 5 weeks apparently paying close attention, the case is a bit complicated, and it is what it is. Trump having successfully derailed all his other more serious cases makes this one depressingly significant, but if they hang, such is life.
*not elected under the Alba banner of course.
It was him that tried to stop Labour from splitting in 2019 and despite what the liars on the left say, he was the one that pushed Labour to Remain.
Thanks to net zero, we now have to have enough infrastructure available at short notice to cover all the old coal baseload as well as the other stuff, and we've got to be able to maintain it for days on end (Dinorwic is good, but once the water is in the bottom lake, it's game over until you've some spare electric to pump it back up again). This has largely been done, mainly by installing warehouses full of gas piston engine gensets all over the place. I know quite a lot about this, having been involved with the installation of them on a few sites (I can also spot one of these sites by walking past - it's supprising how many there are. To most people they just look like industrial buildings, but once you know what the external cooler groups and exhaust stacks look like they are easy enough to spot). This has not been a cheap exercise, and it's all in my electricity bill standing charge somewhere.
But he got Salisbury absolutely spot on and said that Labour lost the election as soon as Corbyn's idiotic statement came out.
Part of the problem in 2017 was boy who cried wolf syndrome. The Tories castigate every Labour leader as dangerous, so when a real dangerous leader was there in Corbyn, those threats were ignored. Then Salisbury happened and thank goodness that Corbyn was Opposition Leader and not Prime Minister.
The hypothetical parallel universe that makes me think that we dodged a bullet is what would have happened had the 2017 election been just one week later. Had the election been just one week later it would have been while Grenfell was ablaze - and I think then between May's campaign and having Grenfell as well, we might have ended up with PM Corbyn in that scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_and_Harlington_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_1990s
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn0vl2e78o
I presume this is due to sticking plaster on top of sticking plaster on top of sticking plaster from the original shit show of the infamous NHS IT scheme started 20 years ago. And again the its all about the culture of cover-up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv22pe8x89no
We are rapidly losing options for tax rises (if we believe their promises). IFS says without tax rises there are already big cuts programmed in. I can't see Labour going all austerity. From Labour I presume messing with IHT threshold and total size of pension pots.
Of course the Tories are being equally dishonest. Aspiration to scrap NI, which is super expensive thing to do, with no plan on how to fund that.
I suspect we need to find huge gains in productivity and growth. And neither party is really addressing how they might achieve this. We have an unproductive economy and increasing numbers of (particularly young people) on the sick.
The problem is we have had crazy Grandpa promises to sort this out by just nationalise everything and on the other side Truss proposing if we only just slash taxes across the board tomorrow that will fix it. Now, Labour are promising Tory-continued (to not rock the boat) and Tories are promising batshit irrelevant policies.
https://news.sky.com/story/turbulence-hit-singapore-airlines-flight-experienced-rapid-change-in-gravitational-force-13144819
'I had my phone stolen in London, and I tracked it to China'
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-09-01/i-got-my-phone-stolen-in-london-and-it-ended-up-in-china
Also, there are also already protections in place, but they can be bypassed. The problem is if you go too far, no legitimate phone can ever be resold / traded-in.
One reason Corbyn succeeded where other, far cleverer and more competent, far left figures failed is that it's precisely his Chauncey Gardiner dumbness that brought different groups - usually at odds - together.
His basic platform was 'socialism is good and cures all ills, let's have lots of it' without getting into the nitty-gritty of how and why that would work. A vagueness that came unstuck towards the end - as had to make decisions and some of the odder views were highlighted - but served him well for most of his leadership.
Which you could read anything into - from the radical anti-imperialist (or rather west) Marxism that was his lodestar pre-leadership, to being 'social democracy turned up to 11' that many supporters saw him as. Look at the vague fuzziness of 'supporting peace' while praising or excusing those who want the opposite, as long as they're anti-west.
Hence why lots of people who really should've known better supported him until it was too late did so and realised post-Salisbury, antisemitism scandal, and amid Brexit wars, they'd picked a dud.
McDonnell could not have done the same though as the mere act of intellectual honesty of what he wanted would've broken up or scared off that coalition that came together under Corbyn far earlier, if it would have coalesced at all. He wouldn't have been able to do the 'I'm just a humble man of peace' act when challenged on views on NATO for example, nor promised entirely contradictory economic paths.
There's a reason Corbyn was, for a time, successful. The same vacuousness while espousing vague 'socialism' that brought him down when people dug into past statements and interpreted what that might mean for themselves.
"Gareth now hopes his case can act as a catalyst to change the way people think about domestic abuse, when men are the victims.
"Hopefully, we can change the way the judicial system looks upon these kinds of cases as has shown with the verdict that has come out. I think that's vitally important on how we can try and move things forward as a society.
"I think it shows that it doesn't send a strong enough message. It shows that if you're a female abuser and you did commit such atrocities, you can still get away with things. It is vital that that is addressed within society, the more men that come forward and speak up about these things, that's the way we can have a true impact."
Here is a younger, sharper Diane Abbott's award-winning speech in defence of civil liberties in the debate on the Counter-Terrorism Bill, 11th June, 2008:-
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/17ea58b3-bd74-4052-bef8-43cd06c8886a?in=16:35:57
A brief message to say that I have no interest in Diane Abbot.
I know very little about her and what I do know I don’t care.
I’m politically interested so I suspect over 90%+ of the nation couldn’t care a less about this supposed News story of a fringe politician who represents an east London seat that 99%+ of the country have never visited. Maybe the “News” should be more focused on the gangland shooting in her seat last night.
The election campaign is as dull as I expected it to be, bar some tory mishaps and one mental policy.
Twitter seems to be the cause of many a downfall . And this of course means IDS could hang onto the seat ! So another reason to bemoan what’s happened !
As for Diane Abbott this seems a stupid self inflicted wound by Labour . What harm could she do if re-elected.
If there’s more to the story than what’s come out already then Labour should explain this .
As for her comments that landed her in trouble . It’s not exactly controversial to say that black people are more likely to suffer long term racism . You can’t hide your skin colour .
But I think what is more likely than any change to pension taxes is development of this government's ideas around encouraging pension funds to invest in Britain.
There is a big problem at the heart of Labour's campaign. They are going to be delivering better services than the Tories - but by spending no more money than the Tories. Something there doesn't connect. The vox pops I heard yesterday on improving the NHS were skeptical at best. Tens of thousands of extra appointments a week provided by coming down hard on non-doms? By having more efficient tax enforcement? Give me a break. Labour hammering the internationally mobile rich is going 100% in the wrong direction. If you want the world's best health service, attract billionaires here. Have them pay property taxes, have them pay VAT on each new Ferrari. Money fleeing will be the first obvious sign of a Labour government.
Which means Labour will be either delivering no better services - or their words on not raising taxes will ring very hollow within the year. This being Labour, I kinda expect both to be true.
Labour’s campaign is spooking some Tory switchers
Voters may be furious with the Tories but glimpses of Starmer’s team and its policies are making some think again
"What feels so different from
1997 is that the chief emotion of those switching their votes isn’t hope. But that doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. On the contrary, this is an election fuelled by anger and anxiety. Many people are furious about what’s been done to them. They have been scalded by the broken promises and failures of the past 14 years. They want something better, but they know how stretched public spending will be, and that the competition over who pays and who benefits will be intense. They are fearful about what’s to come.
But that fear also means the switch against the Conservatives may not be as solid as it looks. A handful of the previously lost Tories I talked to have been unexpectedly spooked by what they have seen of Labour in the past week. Disillusioned as they are, they’re wary of making a further mistake.
A landowner was totally taken aback by what he felt was Starmer’s relish about introducing VAT on school fees immediately and in full. This seemed ill-planned as a sudden change, possibly plunging both private and state schools into chaos, and wrecking the hopes not of the rich but of striving parents. Why didn’t he implement it over three or four years? “It’s made me wonder, is this man a class warrior in disguise? For a year I’ve been certain I’d vote Labour. Now I’m thinking again.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labours-campaign-is-spooking-some-switchers-2wbsbq8sx
Or perhaps we are going to see Rishi as a canny political operator. At last.
(To be fair, it would be easier for him to show that to the British voters than to the bunch of idiot Tory MPs he inherited....)
Exhibit A: every Labour government has left office with more unemployed than it inherited.
There’s no cut through and no interest. Even less so once the Euros start. Apart from some crass photo ops there has only been one news item (natty service) and that was negative for the tories.
The election was over before it began. There has been no movement in the polls. Labour landslide.
As I told you all would be the case two years ago, to much derision at the time.
Have a nice day and do something other than stare at echo chamber politics …
xxx
When one crops up, it increases the likelihood of someone thinking of another.
I accept though that quite a few of those who were sitting on the fence will find reasons to move back to the Tories . Sunak certainly needs a good debate performance next week . Starmer just needs to hammer the Tories on the NHS .
Then there is what is not mentioned. Has Rishi highlighted the government's greatest achievement, on which referendums and elections were fought? No, he has not. And Starmer has two reasons not to mention 2019: Corbyn and Brexit.
So the election is being fought in a strange vacuum where recent history never happened.
Lucan himself almost certainly didn't do the deed, but rather employed someone to steal the family silver for the insurance, not knowing he had taken on a complete psychopath for the task.
One thing those who claim he did it never explain is how a man with a pathological fear of blood could have inflicted such terrible injuries.
TURD WORLD WAR
https://x.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1795914498047447386?s=61
One does not have to like him to realise this stinks.
Can I really trust him?
They are both full of s***!
On the other hand if the odious Abbott can deliver one more Conservative Government, what can one do but laugh at the irony.
Only 8 garden gnomes spotted (5 of those in one garden skewing the numbers, two more almost entirely buried in a raised bed)
Zero meerkats. They were quite the ubiqitous thing in 2017, on the wane by 2019, now seemingly extinct.
One unicorn.
Lots of pottery hedghogs.
Undoubtedly the best spot was two VERY LARGE elephants.
I am also astonished by the sheer number of small wellington boots some families have in their porch. Rainbows, Toy Story, unicorns, single vibrant colours. Rarely green or black.
[Memo to self: after the election, set up an online wellies store. The gaudier the stock in tiny sizes, the greater the possibilities...]
Lots of people are still undecided and many haven't tuned into the election yet, or made their minds up - which happens in the very final 1-3 weeks, and sometimes the last 48-72 hours.
This isn't over.