I have a feeling he's going to turn out to be one of the best Prime Minister's we've had. So far he hasn't put a foot wrong and it 's starting to feel like the country's getting it's confidence back. Possibly he'll be the next Atlee.
LOL!!
If you want a buffoon who wears high viz jackets and poses for photo ops all day then he's not for you. But if like most people you just want someone who'll do the right thing for the right reasons and will make sure we get on with our neighbours and don't gratuitously persecute immigrants and will get on with the business of running the government fairly and competently then I don't think we could do much better.
Yes, that’s roger there, lecturing Britain about its racism from the vantage point of Villefranche-sur-Mer, which directly elected Le Pen’s guy in the first round of the election, no need for a second go
Good to have the true Blighty perspective spelled out from... (checks) oh, Kotor.
I met my first montegerin today who has doubts about joining the EU. He’s also the smartest guy I’ve met on this trip. Milos K
Up until Milos everyone I’ve encountered has been keen (like the whole country). He’s about 30 and very clever and he told me “of course I wanted to join but now I look at Croatia, they lost so many workers due to free movement they had to replace them with people from Asia, is that a good idea for us?”
Interesting. Its a fabulous country and this has been a fabulous trip
That is an interesting point tbf.
There were similar arguments in pre-war Ukraine, a country that was already suffering from emigration to fill the low-skilled and tradesman gaps left by the Polish who’d moved to London or Berlin.
Starmer has 50% women in his Cabinet. Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country. Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
I was quite surprised that my brother and his wife (swing voters, voted Labour this time but Tory in 2017 & 2019) were very impressed by how the riots were handled, particularly the harsh sentences quickly dispensed.
I thought they'd view the riots as the government's fault but in fact they gave HMG credit for dealing with them well.
I have a feeling he's going to turn out to be one of the best Prime Minister's we've had. So far he hasn't put a foot wrong and it 's starting to feel like the country's getting it's confidence back. Possibly he'll be the next Atlee.
LOL!!
If you want a buffoon who wears high viz jackets and poses for photo ops all day then he's not for you. But if like most people you just want someone who'll do the right thing for the right reasons and will make sure we get on with our neighbours and don't gratuitously persecute immigrants and will get on with the business of running the government fairly and competently then I don't think we could do much better.
Yes, that’s roger there, lecturing Britain about its racism from the vantage point of Villefranche-sur-Mer, which directly elected Le Pen’s guy in the first round of the election, no need for a second go
Good to have the true Blighty perspective spelled out from... (checks) oh, Kotor.
I met my first montegerin today who has doubts about joining the EU. He’s also the smartest guy I’ve met on this trip. Milos K
Up until Milos everyone I’ve encountered has been keen (like the whole country). He’s about 30 and very clever and he told me “of course I wanted to join but now I look at Croatia, they lost so many workers due to free movement they had to replace them with people from Asia, is that a good idea for us?”
Interesting. Its a fabulous country and this has been a fabulous trip
That is an interesting point tbf.
Yes. Like you I’d not considered it
Most Montenegrins - that I’ve met (they tend to be younger) want to join because they want the freedom to travel around the world that an EU passport brings
They don’t really need the money. The economy is booming from tourism. They already use the euro so that’s not an issue. Do they want free movement within the EU? - hmm maybe not. They have a high trust low crime society right now
Apparently the oldies are wary because the EU reminds them of Yugoslavia as was. Undemocratic - and bureaucratic
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
That's a cracker
I would hate train drivers to be working again WITH resentment and hard feelings - well done Sir Keir for dodging that bullet and keeping them all sulk free.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
I wouldn't know. I only read the Saturday Times and that takes me all week.
Giles Coren absolutely on fire in the latest. Two columns, one a devastating takedown of junk food, the other a lyrical sensitive naunced appreciation of a luxury safari holiday in Kenya.
"There's something about the African bush at midnight"
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
You should publish your rubbish predictions as some sort of anthology. Possible title: “surprises on the upside”?
I’ve just realised, as you travel around America, that you’re basically Humbert Humbert - but with a dog
Are you sure he took the dog?
This is something about which the Yanks seem to have a bee in their bonnet, and it is not easy.
They always have strange obsessions - preventing incoming haggises is another one.
That's nothing - you should try the Australians. Food in the luggage is a big no-no. And their customs officer made me unpack my walking boots when he realised I came from a small town in Scotland, ie sheep country. But I'd sussed them and made sure the boots were shining clean.
Big fail there.
No need to clean your boots in advance. I got mine cleaned for me by customs in Chicago.
And then an escort through the terminal for having an ice axe in my luggage.
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
I think it ought to be acknowledged that Reeves has been fairly rubbish so far. She's tried to employ a Labour Donor in the Treasury, who has now had to resign - that's hardly sure-footed. She's cancelled the oldies' fuel allowance, perhaps fairly but saving a piffling amount of money. She's tried to accuse the Tories of a £22bn black hole, and the polling indicates she's got 50-50 belief on that - is that good for a new COTE after 40 years of sleazy Tory misrule? At the same time, she has undermined that story by giving a socking pay deal to the fatcat train drivers, with no productivity improvements - something Blair never did. It ain't great is it?
Actually train drivers got a pay increase slightly below national average.
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
I would have been happier with Rayner as PM. Probably the policies wouid have been just as lame and clueless but she looks like she enjoys life and doesn’t want to lecture everyone like a crap but strict deputy headmaster with a secret porn habit
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Given the problem in Britain is primarily with irregular migration from that war-torn hellscape not fit for human habitation, France, that might just solve Sir Keir's problem without him having to actually do anything.
C’est vrait
Starmer might get incredibly lucky if and when the EU gets brutal on migration as, perforce, that means far fewer will reach the channel
My bet is he’ll still allow masses of legal migration however, so I don’t think this issue is going away even then
A mighty storm is brewing in Europe
WRT actual numbers, the boats thing into the UK is small compared both with regular migration into the UK, and with irregular migration into other major European countries.
At some point the UK needs to decide something; and the EU and UK need to decide something too. The UK needs to plan for an immediate several year, slightly painful, time of relying on our home based workforce in place of migration, so that we can start to sort the housing shortage and the work ethic.
And the EU and UK together needs to sort a refugee policy which makes arriving in Europe without prior permission no more attractive than arriving in Chad or Bangladesh. Sadly the post-war settlement won't do for the next decades. The world has changed.
The European left and centre left are starting, I think, to see this point as well as the right. It won't be attractive but I doubt if there is a democractic alternative.
The only comment I've seen on Starmer's government in the real world is colleagues bemoaning private school VAT. And I assume said people didn't vote Labour anyway given that was a the major pre election policy.
The WFA stuff I'm sure has annoyed older voters. But again, they voted Tory by and large. And it needed reform in some or form to be removed from wealthier pensioner.
Public sector pay I've only seen mentioned on here. But it's worth remembering there's some inflation catch-up needed in various areas (even if not all). If he's sensible he'll draw the line in the sand there and limit pay increase to the much lower levels of inflation going forward.
In short, I fail to see the excitement from many on here on how Starmer is performing (in either direction). Too early to cast judgement. Absent injury or scandal, he'll be there until the next election.
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
Oh, was this why the “Russian podcasts” story broke yesterday? Some of us thought it was supposed to be a distraction from the Hunter Biden trial.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s team caught the Chief of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, Nick Biase, admitting on camera that the legal persecution of Trump is and was a politically motivated “perversion of justice”.
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
I would have been happier with Rayner as PM. Probably the policies wouid have been just as lame and clueless but she looks like she enjoys life and doesn’t want to lecture everyone like a crap but strict deputy headmaster with a secret porn habit
I'd have thought the PM with the most humourless lecturing manner was Thatcher.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
How about doing something radical like for example state pension is 55% of the value of min wage working a 35 hour week?
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
Women leaders have been a mixed set of successes and failures. It might be better to simply choose the best person for the job rather than let gender and heritage determine it. There is still a place for stale and pale men in politics.
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
How about doing something radical like for example state pension is 55% of the value of min wage working a 35 hour week?
It's not a bad idea.
I'm sure there's a discussion to be had about what percentage and what measure of wages to use, but it would help align incentives, and give a predictable situation where we all knew where we stood.
Which seems to be to important thing if you want people and employers to play their part as well.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
How about doing something radical like for example state pension is 55% of the value of min wage working a 35 hour week?
So long as when you say ‘state pension’, you mean the pension paid to former employees of the State.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
It worked. The strikes are off. The cowardly Tories were fucking hopeless at industrial relations, such that nobody could trust the railway to – you know – actually run a train on time if at all. They were a total and utter failure. In just a few weeks, Labour have achieved more on the railways than the useless Tories did in 14 years.
Or, alternatively, the unions are so undemocratic they want their bought politicians in power, so they will do anything to undermine a Conservative government.
And many unions do tend to have an undemocratic trait running through them.
Whatever gets you through the night. The trains are running again. Just rejoice at that news.
How long before the next strike on the railways, then? Remember ASLEF were going to strike over the management of - nationalised - LNER. I expect more of the same shite soon.
The strikes are off. Those are the facts. Do you remember the shambles under the last government? Clearly you do not.
I remember the strikes by the unions, yes. If you think that there will be no more rail strikes under this government, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
You think the unions are friends of Labour. They're not. They're not friends of the public, either.
They're not, but most unions are fairly clear-eyed about how much power they have and how to use it to negotiate the best available deal for the members. But also where to stop.
Where the previous government went wrong was assuming that, by being steely and determined, they could force their will on the negotiations. Given that the strikes were hurting the government as well as the strikers, and that the episodic strikes were sustainable for months, that wasn't going to work.
Sunak did not (as the dread phrase goes) hold all the cards, which is why budgeting on the basis that they did was so silly.
What the Tories forget is that Thatcher tactically retreated at the first miners strike before stockpiling coal and coming back to beat Scargill the second time round
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
How about doing something radical like for example state pension is 55% of the value of min wage working a 35 hour week?
So long as when you say ‘state pension’, you mean the pension paid to former employees of the State.
No I mean the state pension as in the one everyone gets....55% of min wage equates to about the state pension now
I have a feeling he's going to turn out to be one of the best Prime Minister's we've had. So far he hasn't put a foot wrong and it 's starting to feel like the country's getting it's confidence back. Possibly he'll be the next Atlee.
LOL!!
If you want a buffoon who wears high viz jackets and poses for photo ops all day then he's not for you. But if like most people you just want someone who'll do the right thing for the right reasons and will make sure we get on with our neighbours and don't gratuitously persecute immigrants and will get on with the business of running the government fairly and competently then I don't think we could do much better.
Yes, that’s roger there, lecturing Britain about its racism from the vantage point of Villefranche-sur-Mer, which directly elected Le Pen’s guy in the first round of the election, no need for a second go
Good to have the true Blighty perspective spelled out from... (checks) oh, Kotor.
I met my first montegerin today who has doubts about joining the EU. He’s also the smartest guy I’ve met on this trip. Milos K
Up until Milos everyone I’ve encountered has been keen (like the whole country). He’s about 30 and very clever and he told me “of course I wanted to join but now I look at Croatia, they lost so many workers due to free movement they had to replace them with people from Asia, is that a good idea for us?”
Interesting. Its a fabulous country and this has been a fabulous trip
Worth noting that Poland lost a lot of workers initially, but then they returned with a lot more skills; a little bit like how the Irish diaspora returned in the 1990s.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
National Insurance is just another tax.
HMRC literally calls it a tax in international tax treaties.
Because it doesn't just walk like a tax, talk like a tax, and quack like a tax, it is a f***ing tax.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
Starmer stays as long as he likes. It's much harder to get rid of a leader (or Deputy Leader) than the Conservatives, so we won't get the same psychodrama.
It isn't impossible that he decides to retire. He is no spring chicken and may feel that his job is done by 2028, and time to freshen up in favour of our own Kamala.
With the end* of the strikes and unrest there has been an acceleration of delivery, with treatment teams going gangbusters while management is busy supporting that process rather than firefighting rota gaps from strikes etc. The brakes are off and it's pedal to the metal.
I suspect that by the anniversary of the election there will be a noticeable reduction in waiting lists noticed by individuals as well as in the figures. I wonder how well other public services and parts of the NHS are doing.
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
Women leaders have been a mixed set of successes and failures. It might be better to simply choose the best person for the job rather than let gender and heritage determine it. There is still a place for stale and pale men in politics.
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
The Tories don’t care about gender or race, and just think it’s funny that Labour and the LDs obsess over it, while in Labour’s case electing a long succession of white men.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
Its a f***ing tax, it doesn't matter what you call it, its a tax levied by HMRC on employees wages.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Go back to a pure inflation lock, and the energy price spike only enters the calculation once- when it appears in the inflation rate. With the triple lock, the same spike appears in the sums twice. So pensions went up by 10.1 percent in 2023 (in line with inflation), then by 8.4 percent in 2024 (in line with earnings, as they belatedly caught up with the cost of living). Hence the windfall problem for government; a shiny sixpence says that it wasn't in the spending plans.
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
How about doing something radical like for example state pension is 55% of the value of min wage working a 35 hour week?
So long as when you say ‘state pension’, you mean the pension paid to former employees of the State.
No I mean the state pension as in the one everyone gets....55% of min wage equates to about the state pension now
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
Women leaders have been a mixed set of successes and failures. It might be better to simply choose the best person for the job rather than let gender and heritage determine it. There is still a place for stale and pale men in politics.
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
The Tories don’t care about gender or race, and just think it’s funny that Labour and the LDs obsess over it, while in Labour’s case electing a long succession of white men.
If Tories don't care about it why do they constantly bang on about it?
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
In various international tax treaties, such as the ones we have with the US, UK National Insurance payments are considered as a tax on income.
For example, the US taxes citizens worldwide. But any taxes you pay on income locally are offset against the US tax owed. So, as a US citizen in the UK, the US Treasury accepts that your NI+Income Tax can be subtracted from US income tax owed.
I wouldn't know. I only read the Saturday Times and that takes me all week.
Giles Coren absolutely on fire in the latest. Two columns, one a devastating takedown of junk food, the other a lyrical sensitive naunced appreciation of a luxury safari holiday in Kenya.
"There's something about the African bush at midnight"
The guy can write.
Yes he can. Whether he'd be a writer in the first place without his dear old dad is another question. He might be introducing Year 9 to Shakespeare, although iirc he once regretted not earning squillions in the City.
As for the sentiment, of course there is something about the African bush at midnight. That's why they run luxury safari holidays there!
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
National Insurance is just another tax.
HMRC literally calls it a tax in international tax treaties.
Because it doesn't just walk like a tax, talk like a tax, and quack like a tax, it is a f***ing tax.
It is defined as a tax in those treaties, *for the purposes of those treaties.* Look them up if you don't believe me.
And if we are on about ducks, how does the rumoured existence of a thing which has a beak like a duck, lays eggs like a duck and swims like a duck but turns out to be a f***ing mammal fit in your world picture? Does it even hint at the possibility of things which are cladistically something but have important phenotypic characteristics suggesting something else?
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Did he also believe in a flat earth and that Australia is fictional? Because not sure how anyone who knows about the Southern Hemisphere could think that.
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
Women leaders have been a mixed set of successes and failures. It might be better to simply choose the best person for the job rather than let gender and heritage determine it. There is still a place for stale and pale men in politics.
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
The Tories don’t care about gender or race, and just think it’s funny that Labour and the LDs obsess over it, while in Labour’s case electing a long succession of white men.
If Tories don't care about it why do they constantly bang on about it?
Because the other parties bang on about little else, and mocking them for own lack of diversity in leadership is funny.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
National Insurance is just another tax.
HMRC literally calls it a tax in international tax treaties.
Because it doesn't just walk like a tax, talk like a tax, and quack like a tax, it is a f***ing tax.
It is defined as a tax in those treaties, *for the purposes of those treaties.* Look them up if you don't believe me.
And if we are on about ducks, how does the rumoured existence of a thing which has a beak like a duck, lays eggs like a duck and swims like a duck but turns out to be a f***ing mammal fit in your world picture? Does it even hint at the possibility of things which are cladistically something but have important phenotypic characteristics suggesting something else?
I'm not sure what your point is but I don't think you do either.
Hence coming up with batshit analogies like a random weirdo painting a 30 sign on a sheep as being equivalent to NI which is an actual real life tax on wages levied by HMRC not by weirdos.
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Did he also believe in a flat earth and that Australia is fictional? Because not sure how anyone who knows about the Southern Hemisphere could think that.
Australia is obviously fictional.
- dump convicts in a desert and accidentally create a social democracy? - a national animal that is an egg laying mammal with a duck bill and poisonous thumbs? - black swans? are you taking the piss?
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
Its a f***ing tax, it doesn't matter what you call it, its a tax levied by HMRC on employees wages.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
And dolphins swim in the sea and have fins, so what sort of scumbag would argue they were anything other than fishes?
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Did he also believe in a flat earth and that Australia is fictional? Because not sure how anyone who knows about the Southern Hemisphere could think that.
It was in fact the then test series in Australia that enabled me to convince him of the more popular version. He just hadn’t thought about it very much, and had left school early to do his degree by the time he was eighteen.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
In other words challenging the lies of the far right and rooting out its bigotry?
I certainly agree with that, and until 1929 it was working for Weimar too.
The real problem was Presidential rule of Hindenburg, and moderate Conservatives bringing the Far Right into government, initially in the states.
Moderate Conservative now should learn the lesson that you should not sup with the devil.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
Germany didn’t *need* lebensraum, the Nazis did as a distraction
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Did he also believe in a flat earth and that Australia is fictional? Because not sure how anyone who knows about the Southern Hemisphere could think that.
Maybe he simply hadn't thought about it previously. It's not really a core maths skill.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
In other words challenging the lies of the far right and rooting out its bigotry?
I certainly agree with that, and until 1929 it was working for Weimar too.
The real problem was Presidential rule of Hindenburg, and moderate Conservatives bringing the Far Right into government, initially in the states. Moderate Conservative now should learn the lesson that you should not sup with the devil.
It was deeper than that. Steal Enough Stuff And We Will Be Rich.
"Gold is the corpse of value", says Goto Dengo.
"I don't understand."
"If you want to understand, look out the window" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here - "he points to his head "- in the intelligence of the people, and here - " he holds out his hands "- in the work that they do. Getting rid of the gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
National Insurance is just another tax.
HMRC literally calls it a tax in international tax treaties.
Because it doesn't just walk like a tax, talk like a tax, and quack like a tax, it is a f***ing tax.
It is defined as a tax in those treaties, *for the purposes of those treaties.* Look them up if you don't believe me.
And if we are on about ducks, how does the rumoured existence of a thing which has a beak like a duck, lays eggs like a duck and swims like a duck but turns out to be a f***ing mammal fit in your world picture? Does it even hint at the possibility of things which are cladistically something but have important phenotypic characteristics suggesting something else?
I'm not sure what your point is but I don't think you do either.
Hence coming up with batshit analogies like a random weirdo painting a 30 sign on a sheep as being equivalent to NI which is an actual real life tax on wages levied by HMRC not by weirdos.
I'm not getting through to you, am I? The thing about logic is that it's universal. It applies to the class of all dead sheep to exactly the same extent it applies to the class of all taxes.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
They should have skipped the war and asked for Americans to come and run them?
Starmer has 50% women in the Cabinet for the first time ever.
Has fixed the far right race riots in less time than anyone else could have done
Has got rid of a Gordon Brown gimmick which gave £300 for fuel to the richest cohort in the country.
Has got the doctors working again and the train drivers with no resentments or hard feelings
.... and has started to show Israel that it's support isn't guaranteed.
Not bad for 2 months.....
Yeah yeah, but when will you actually make a woman leader?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
Women leaders have been a mixed set of successes and failures. It might be better to simply choose the best person for the job rather than let gender and heritage determine it. There is still a place for stale and pale men in politics.
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
The Tories don’t care about gender or race, and just think it’s funny that Labour and the LDs obsess over it, while in Labour’s case electing a long succession of white men.
If Tories don't care about it why do they constantly bang on about it?
Because the other parties bang on about little else, and mocking them for own lack of diversity in leadership is funny.
Taking the eye off the ball to play tokenistic one upmanship doesn't win elections does it?
The Tories did it and had their worst defeat in both seats and vote share in over a century.
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
They should have skipped the war and asked for Americans to come and run them?
It would have saved vast pile of cash, lives and made them even richer and more powerful.
Hence the joke behind the film "The Mouse That Roared" - being defeated by the Americans in WWII seemed to be quite a good deal.
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
I think there was a survey of Harvard graduates where about 30% of them got that right.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
1) Not blaming the Jews for stuff they didn't do. 2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany. 3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
They should have skipped the war and asked for Americans to come and run them?
It would have saved vast pile of cash, lives and made them even richer and more powerful.
Hence the joke behind the film "The Mouse That Roared" - being defeated by the Americans in WWII seemed to be quite a good deal.
Maybe we should skip WW3 and invite China to run the government.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
Germany didn’t *need* lebensraum, the Nazis did as a distraction
No, uniting the German population of Europe by overturning the borders set by the treaty of Versailles was their primary motivation.
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Ha yes. I work as an IT manager, and that temptation is there all the time. It’s usually way easier in the moment to bullsh!t an answer in the management meeting, than it is to say I’ll research the subject and come back to the group later.
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
We live in a country that has always accepted the elderly are declining in health, cannot increase their income, and as they become more vulnerable need to be looked after and respected having worked a long life and paid all their taxes
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Ha yes. I work as an IT manager, and that temptation is there all the time. It’s usually way easier in the moment to bullsh!t an answer in the management meeting, than it is to say I’ll research the subject and come back to the group later.
I have occasionally helped prepare students for university interviews. The hardest thing to get across is that sometimes the better answer to a question is “I don’t know (though it might be…)” rather than trying to bluff.
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Ha yes. I work as an IT manager, and that temptation is there all the time. It’s usually way easier in the moment to bullsh!t an answer in the management meeting, than it is to say I’ll research the subject and come back to the group later.
Hey I am spending a week in Pakistan in December, bound for blighty on 20ish Dec and have to change plane somewhere anyway. What is Xmas in the sandpit like?
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
We live in a country that has always accepted the elderly are declining in health, cannot increase their income, and as they become more vulnerable need to be looked after and respected having worked a long life and paid all their taxes
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
Shouldn't younger people with health and other vulnerabilities also get enough money to pay the winter fuel bill too?
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
Its a f***ing tax, it doesn't matter what you call it, its a tax levied by HMRC on employees wages.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
And dolphins swim in the sea and have fins, so what sort of scumbag would argue they were anything other than fishes?
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
Its a f***ing tax, it doesn't matter what you call it, its a tax levied by HMRC on employees wages.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
And dolphins swim in the sea and have fins, so what sort of scumbag would argue they were anything other than fishes?
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Given the problem in Britain is primarily with irregular migration from that war-torn hellscape not fit for human habitation, France, that might just solve Sir Keir's problem without him having to actually do anything.
C’est vrait
Starmer might get incredibly lucky if and when the EU gets brutal on migration as, perforce, that means far fewer will reach the channel
My bet is he’ll still allow masses of legal migration however, so I don’t think this issue is going away even then
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Ha yes. I work as an IT manager, and that temptation is there all the time. It’s usually way easier in the moment to bullsh!t an answer in the management meeting, than it is to say I’ll research the subject and come back to the group later.
Hey I am spending a week in Pakistan in December, bound for blighty on 20ish Dec and have to change plane somewhere anyway. What is Xmas in the sandpit like?
Awesome, expect 20ºC or thereabouts, maybe 3% chance of rain on any given day - but peak holiday season so the fancy hotels will be at top rates. Worth staying for a day or two if you’ve not been here before and it breaks the journey.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Given the problem in Britain is primarily with irregular migration from that war-torn hellscape not fit for human habitation, France, that might just solve Sir Keir's problem without him having to actually do anything.
C’est vrait
Starmer might get incredibly lucky if and when the EU gets brutal on migration as, perforce, that means far fewer will reach the channel
My bet is he’ll still allow masses of legal migration however, so I don’t think this issue is going away even then
More likely will Reeves still be CoE ? She's been fairly clumsy so far and SKS likes to remind us how ruthless he is, She'll fall on his sword before he does so himself.
In what way has she been 'clumsy'? She has been the opposite – sharp and ruthless. The idea that she should court popularity a few weeks into the parliament to support 'Alanbrooke', the bloke on the internet, and the Tory client vote is for the birds.
The contrast of giving the unions big pay rises and concurrently taking away the winter fuel allowance is clumsy at best and idiotic at worst.
Indeed it is really hard to see why the government prefers to have doctors, nurses and teachers working rather than striking when we could be paying that same money to retired millionaires instead as a little thank you bonus for winning the second world war.
I agree, I am in favour of taking away the WFA from the most selfish generation in history, but the optics look bad.
What they should have done is something like getting rid of the WFA but increasing the pension by that amount but changing the tax allowances for pensioners so the really poor ones would have got it tax free.
In practice, that's what happened. The inflation spike made the triple lock act strangely- pensions got the inflation boost two years ago and the subsequent pay boost last year. Double bubble as they say.
That windfall was was more than the WFA. Granny still has more money after inflation to pay her fuel bills than three years ago. But yes, the politics and optics were awful.
But with nearly five years until the election, that's not something to get excited about.
Whilst I agree with you, I wonder if it would have been any different without the triple lock? I assume that when they finally get the balls to get rid of it (as they should have long ago) they will revert to some tie to inflation. In which case the rises in pensions would have followed a similar trajectoory even if the triple lock had not been there.
Reeves does have the opportunity to do some serious rebalancing and rejigging over the next couple of budgets. Dumping the triple lock and making all income subject to the same tax regimes whilst at the same time getting rid of some of the stupid cliff edges would seem to me to be obvious and generally positive moves. Merging IC and NI would be a braver move but again one I would applaud. The trouble is I am not sure she is really interested in doing anything properly radical and just wants to tinker in favour of her own pressure groups just as the Tories did when they were in power with the pensioners.
Once you've made 'all income subject to the same tax regimes', merging ICT and NI is a piece of piss because it will affect no one.
I agree with you but I was talking in terms of the commonly perceived but incorrect notion that NI is not a tax (we have some adherents to this belief on here)
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
The essentialist fallacy in all its glory.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
According to international treaties, employees NI is defined as an income tax. By both the UK government and other governments.
Any definition I have ever seen in a treaty has expressly been for the purposes of that treaty only. Good luck telling the voters that their point that if you call something insurance, and make representations to the payer about benefits they can expect to receive commensurate with the payments, it looks a bit like insurance and a pension plan, sounds reasonable, but see appendix 3 to the Laccadive Islands dual taxation agreement 1958.
Its a f***ing tax, it doesn't matter what you call it, its a tax levied by HMRC on employees wages.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
And dolphins swim in the sea and have fins, so what sort of scumbag would argue they were anything other than fishes?
Nah, they are obviously ichthyosaurs.
Short necked Plesiosaurs?
Really enthusiastic penguins?
Well, if they have fins and swim in the sea ... come to think of it, some crocs did too. Proper fins and all. And maybe some carnivorous dinosaurs? Auks, too, turtles, and so on. So the moral is that NI is what you call it and what it is.
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
We live in a country that has always accepted the elderly are declining in health, cannot increase their income, and as they become more vulnerable need to be looked after and respected having worked a long life and paid all their taxes
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
Shouldn't younger people with health and other vulnerabilities also get enough money to pay the winter fuel bill too?
That is a matter for the HMG but it should not be at the expense of pensioners whilst train drivers are paid above inflation wages on already high pay of £65,000 plus
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
We live in a country that has always accepted the elderly are declining in health, cannot increase their income, and as they become more vulnerable need to be looked after and respected having worked a long life and paid all their taxes
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
Shouldn't younger people with health and other vulnerabilities also get enough money to pay the winter fuel bill too?
That is a matter for the HMG but it should not be at the expense of pensioners whilst train drivers are paid above inflation wages on already high pay of £65,000 plus
Should it be at the expense of pensioners who are getting a above inflationary rise thanks to the Triple Lock who have no problem paying their fuel bills?
On the state pension. The current full rate is £11,502 a year. In 2022 it was £9,627 a year. So that's an increase of £1,875 in 2 years, thanks to the triple lock. And, of course, a fair bit of that increase is accounted for by inflationary energy costs. In that context, the fuel allowance of £300 is not, I think, as big a deal as people make it out to be - essentially it means that the pension has risen by £1,575 rather than £1,875 over two years.
I want to correct this to the WFA is only £300 for those 80
Which, in general, makes its loss even less of a deal.
There are very many pensioners who are outside the means testing where it will be a very big deal this winter and why so many mps are opposed to it including the lib dems and a number of labour mps who are very worried
🎻
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
We live in a country that has always accepted the elderly are declining in health, cannot increase their income, and as they become more vulnerable need to be looked after and respected having worked a long life and paid all their taxes
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
850,000 pensioners do not claim the pension credit to which they are entitled. Yes, we can agree the state pension is inadequate but if the additional support goes unclaimed what can be done?
I like the idea the most intelligent person you ever meet is the one that agrees with you.
The most intelligent people you meet, are those who can convince you to challenge your own viewpoints.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
One of the brightest people I know is now a maths graduate who is now a professor at Oxford.
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
Oh there’s plenty of those, who are very specialist in one area of knowledge and have very surprising gaps elsewhere!
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
I think we all have large gaps in what we know: the best one can do is try not to be confidently wrong.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Ha yes. I work as an IT manager, and that temptation is there all the time. It’s usually way easier in the moment to bullsh!t an answer in the management meeting, than it is to say I’ll research the subject and come back to the group later.
Hey I am spending a week in Pakistan in December, bound for blighty on 20ish Dec and have to change plane somewhere anyway. What is Xmas in the sandpit like?
Awesome, expect 20ºC or thereabouts, maybe 3% chance of rain on any given day - but peak holiday season so the fancy hotels will be at top rates. Worth staying for a day or two if you’ve not been here before and it breaks the journey.
To add @mercator, that Christmas isn’t a formal holiday here, so it’s a lot more relaxed than you might expect, no problem with trains and taxis, restaurant bookings etc.
New Year is the bigger celebration, which if I’m honest is best avoided unless you have a massive budget.
"A large majority of citizens want a fundamentally different migration policy. Very few consider the government to be competent in combating crime and asylum policy - the AfD does better here than all three traffic light parties combined."
Europe is about to shift brutally to the right on migration and asylum. Everyone will follow where Denmark led. I’ve been saying it on here for a while
Because the alternative is actual Nazis in power. Eventually the voters will rebel and they don’t care if you call them racist
Feeble Sir Keir means Britain will be last to the party
Surely it's weak to capitulate to the racist tendencies of the far right and strong to oppose it? Or did I misunderstand WW2?
Yes you did. If Hitler had kept his racist operations within his own borders, no WW2. Some jolly stern notes perhaps.
There is also the point that capitulating to the er.. Solutions of the Far Right is the problem. Not dealing with the *Problems*.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
What do you think would have been a better solution to Germanys "Jewish Problem" and need for Lebensraum?
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
Germany didn’t *need* lebensraum, the Nazis did as a distraction
No, uniting the German population of Europe by overturning the borders set by the treaty of Versailles was their primary motivation.
That was the excuse, the victim narrative. It was about providing justification for having “strong men” in charge
Comments
I thought they'd view the riots as the government's fault but in fact they gave HMG credit for dealing with them well.
Most Montenegrins - that I’ve met (they tend to be younger) want to join because they want the freedom to travel around the world that an EU passport brings
They don’t really need the money. The economy is booming from tourism. They already use the euro so that’s not an issue. Do they want free movement within the EU? - hmm maybe not. They have a high trust low crime society right now
Apparently the oldies are wary because the EU reminds them of Yugoslavia as was. Undemocratic - and bureaucratic
I wonder if they will ever join
Pure inflation lock is probably too stingy (though the current generation of pensioners were happy to subject their parents to it). From 1980, the state pension probably did drift too low, hence the need for the TL to gradually nudge it higher, a process that probably needs to run a bit longer. And I'm fairly sure that means-testing the state pension just creates bad incentives not to save. But permanent triple lock is clearly going too far the other way.
So the 'same tax regimes' initially would apply to all income - pensions, benefits, dividends, interest and everything else. All should have a tax free allowance, a normal rate and a higher rate just like ICT. That seems to me to be the easy sell - or at least easier. Once that is done, convincing the public - especially pensioners - that NI is just another tax that should be rolled in to ICT and applied to all income will be the harder sell. But I think it needs to be done. Certainly getting rid of the NI cut off at pension age should be a priority.
Giles Coren absolutely on fire in the latest. Two columns, one a devastating takedown of junk food, the other a lyrical sensitive naunced appreciation of a luxury safari holiday in Kenya.
"There's something about the African bush at midnight"
The guy can write.
No need to clean your boots in advance. I got mine cleaned for me by customs in Chicago.
And then an escort through the terminal for having an ice axe in my luggage.
Montenegro will post around 5% GDP growth this year and it already feels rather affluent in places. Like a more exotic slovenia
https://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/forecasts/2024/spring/spring_forecast-2024_me_en.pdf
Why would you risk this happy prospect by joining the EU which is so unhappy it is electing Nazis in Germany?
Or did I misunderstand WW2?
The Tories could be on their fourth woman leader in November.
Let us not even start about the Tories having their second non white leader by then.
I mean next year it will be fifty years since the Tories first elected a woman leader.
At some point the UK needs to decide something; and the EU and UK need to decide something too. The UK needs to plan for an immediate several year, slightly painful, time of relying on our home based workforce in place of migration, so that we can start to sort the housing shortage and the work ethic.
And the EU and UK together needs to sort a refugee policy which makes arriving in Europe without prior permission no more attractive than arriving in Chad or Bangladesh. Sadly the post-war settlement won't do for the next decades. The world has changed.
The European left and centre left are starting, I think, to see this point as well as the right. It won't be attractive but I doubt if there is a democractic alternative.
Not until 2027, anyway.
The WFA stuff I'm sure has annoyed older voters. But again, they voted Tory by and large. And it needed reform in some or form to be removed from wealthier pensioner.
Public sector pay I've only seen mentioned on here. But it's worth remembering there's some inflation catch-up needed in various areas (even if not all). If he's sensible he'll draw the line in the sand there and limit pay increase to the much lower levels of inflation going forward.
In short, I fail to see the excitement from many on here on how Starmer is performing (in either direction). Too early to cast judgement. Absent injury or scandal, he'll be there until the next election.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s team caught the Chief of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, Nick Biase, admitting on camera that the legal persecution of Trump is and was a politically motivated “perversion of justice”.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-doj-chief-of-public-affairs-caught-on-camera-admitting-trump-indictments-are-politically-motivated-perversion-of-justice
https://x.com/scrowder/status/1831696327782052110
He’s responded with an apology, saying that what he said to a date has no actual bearing on his real views.
Say I take a dead sheep and write 30 on it in a red circle and stick it by the roadside, we could have a really heated debate about whether it was a dead mammal or a road sign but what would be the point? Because even if you win it's a hugely anomalous example of whichever you say it is. Most road signs don't get flyblown and smell bad, most dead mammals don't dictate a maximum speed for motor vehicles, and any dealings with it have to take those anomalies into account. What you are doing is stipulating that NI is a tax, and then in para 2 smuggling in the suggestion that there are no anomalies. If a thing is a tax, it is necessarily "just another" tax. This is not the case. Your harder sell is a fallacy which is why it's unsellable.
(Unless you know a maths professor or a rocket designer)
I think Ed Davey would have been a better choice for LDs in 2019 too.
I'm sure there's a discussion to be had about what percentage and what measure of wages to use, but it would help align incentives, and give a predictable situation where we all knew where we stood.
Which seems to be to important thing if you want people and employers to play their part as well.
HMRC literally calls it a tax in international tax treaties.
Because it doesn't just walk like a tax, talk like a tax, and quack like a tax, it is a f***ing tax.
Starmer stays as long as he likes. It's much harder to get rid of a leader (or Deputy Leader) than the Conservatives, so we won't get the same psychodrama.
It isn't impossible that he decides to retire. He is no spring chicken and may feel that his job is done by 2028, and time to freshen up in favour of our own Kamala.
With the end* of the strikes and unrest there has been an acceleration of delivery, with treatment teams going gangbusters while management is busy supporting that process rather than firefighting rota gaps from strikes etc. The brakes are off and it's pedal to the metal.
I suspect that by the anniversary of the election there will be a noticeable reduction in waiting lists noticed by individuals as well as in the figures. I wonder how well other public services and parts of the NHS are doing.
Its not just in the small print, its exactly what it always has been.
Only those who are absolute wilful idiots think its anything other than a tax.
The Nazis were a reaction to the *Problem* of Germany in the Great Depression and after WWI.
Alternative *Solutions* to geneocide were available. See the US under FDR.
There are very many working families who struggle and they haven't all got triple locked above-inflation wage rises.
Why should we worry more about pensioners than anyone else? Especially when infants are the most vulnerable and need heating the most, not pensioners, and there's more infants at home in working families than in pensioner families.
A little bit of Appeasement perhaps?
For example, the US taxes citizens worldwide. But any taxes you pay on income locally are offset against the US tax owed. So, as a US citizen in the UK, the US Treasury accepts that your NI+Income Tax can be subtracted from US income tax owed.
As for the sentiment, of course there is something about the African bush at midnight. That's why they run luxury safari holidays there!
After he graduated I had a conversation with him where I had to explain the causes of the seasons (he thought it was the varying distance of the earth from the sun during the year).
And if we are on about ducks, how does the rumoured existence of a thing which has a beak like a duck, lays eggs like a duck and swims like a duck but turns out to be a f***ing mammal fit in your world picture? Does it even hint at the possibility of things which are cladistically something but have important phenotypic characteristics suggesting something else?
2) Educating the population on not being racist - see post WWII Germany.
3) Realising the problem was actually a shortage of workers, once the German economy got going. Realise, ahead of the game, that empires are not what you need. You don't need to steal resources. Trade is actually better. See the Japanese and German miracles, post war.
Everything that Germany and Japan achieved post war was possible before the war. They just needed a change in the management and the business plan.
Enjoy the Montenegrin evening - I've only ever been to Kotor but it is a magical place.
Hence coming up with batshit analogies like a random weirdo painting a 30 sign on a sheep as being equivalent to NI which is an actual real life tax on wages levied by HMRC not by weirdos.
- dump convicts in a desert and accidentally create a social democracy?
- a national animal that is an egg laying mammal with a duck bill and poisonous thumbs?
- black swans? are you taking the piss?
I certainly agree with that, and until 1929 it was working for Weimar too.
The real problem was Presidential rule of Hindenburg, and moderate Conservatives bringing the Far Right into government, initially in the states.
Moderate Conservative now should learn the lesson that you should not sup with the devil.
I know a guy who works at an F1 team, and the number of times the mechanical and aeronautical engineers have disagreements about basic principals is apparently way more than you’d expect!
"Gold is the corpse of value", says Goto Dengo.
"I don't understand."
"If you want to understand, look out the window" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here - "he points to his head "- in the intelligence of the people, and here - " he holds out his hands "- in the work that they do. Getting rid of the gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
Well done exploding the platypus myth, though
The Tories did it and had their worst defeat in both seats and vote share in over a century.
One of the hardest lesson a teacher learns is that sometimes the answer to a student’s question is “I don’t know’: the temptation to just make something up on the spot can be overwhelming.
That’s probably how religions get
started…
Edit to add: the real problem is when you convince yourself that your plausible explanation must be true.
Hence the joke behind the film "The Mouse That Roared" - being defeated by the Americans in WWII seemed to be quite a good deal.
EDIT:
The state pension is inadequate and so additional support is needed and has been recognised by all governments
Really enthusiastic penguins?
New Year is the bigger celebration, which if I’m honest is best avoided unless you have a massive budget.