Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
For individuals maybe, for couples not
Good morning
The problem is that it feeds into maintaining high prices and puts the borrowers at risk of negative equity if the market falls, which by the way happened in the 2008 crisis
It is more a risk for the bank or building society lending a la 2008, at worst even if they could no longer afford repayments the borrowing couple would have built up some capital in it when sold in most cases rather than just renting. Negative equity only would occur if a massive slump in house prices
Negative equity occured betweeen 1991 - 1996 and 2007 - 2009 and it destroyed peoples lives
I witnessed a young couple thrown out of their home onto their front garden as the bailiffs repossed it for the building society and it remains strong in my memory 30 years later
We live in a volatile world where wars and the climate crisis are occurring and nobody can predict what may happen to interest rates and recessions going forward
Encouraging reckless lending is irresponsible and I have seen the trauma caused
LBG like Nationwide are offering 5.5 times income.
The stress tests are quite severe, it is more geared for two high earning couples who couldn’t afford to buy the dream house that their parents could on equivalent salaries.
The difference between 2007 - 09 is nobody is offering mortgages of 125% house value.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
When we bought our first house, in 1963, I paid the mortgage out of my salary, and my wife stayed at home to look after things there, including our first child. And I wasn't earning a fortune; I was running a small suburban pharmacy.
We very much mirror each other though it was 1964 when we bought our first home
When we moved to North Wales the following year we bought a new build home for £3,250 but we couldn't afford the extra £250 for central heating
We did add it to the mortgage later, but what todays generation seems to miss is that in our day many wives stayed at home looking after their children (3 in our case) and the mortgage was based on the single earner
Indeed it is the reason my wife's state pension is just £5,250 as she only had a few years of NI contributions
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
I have literally just written "and he's probably got a point". And where am I being unpleasant? I am simply pointing out that the couple will see it as making sense on a microeconomic level regardless of the macroeconomic implications. Do you see my point?
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
It is amusing to change one's ethnicity for an evening, and some of that undoubtedly involves parodying the cliched characteristics associated with the ethnicity you're assuming. I make no argument for or against that, or peoples' motives for doing it, but I do observe that it's an almost exact equivalent to dressing up as an alternative gender (usually a man as a woman) and behaving as an exaggerated and often ruthless parody that gender - and this is not only tolerated, but celebrated as an art form that is shown to kids at a young age.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
When we bought our first house, in 1963, I paid the mortgage out of my salary, and my wife stayed at home to look after things there, including our first child. And I wasn't earning a fortune; I was running a small suburban pharmacy.
We very much mirror each other though it was 1964 when we bought our first home
When we moved to North Wales the following year we bought a new build home for £3,250 but we couldn't afford the extra £250 for central heating
We did add it to the mortgage later, but what todays generation seems to miss is that in our day many wives stayed at home looking after their children (3 in our case) and the mortgage was based on the single earner
Indeed it is the reason my wife's state pension is just £5,250 as she only had a few years of NI contributions
We do indeed very much mirror each other. We married in 1962 and found a one-bed flat to rent for £2 a week, over an 'open all hours' type shop on the edge of an industrial area in Lancashire. I was a relief pharmacist for a chain of pharmacies and my wife a teacher. It wasn't the best of flats..... outside toilet etc, but it did enable us to save for 12 months.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
My first mortgage cost me about that as a percentage of my salary. It soon reduced as my pay went up.
It was a bit different in the 70s and 80s when inflation and interest rates were higher and so the initial cost was higher, but inflation rapidly reduced that cost.
If we assume future inflation at 2% then the debt repayments aren't eroded by inflation as quickly.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
I have literally just written "and he's probably got a point". And where am I being unpleasant? I am simply pointing out that the couple will see it as making sense on a microeconomic level regardless of the macroeconomic implications. Do you see my point?
You derided and dehumanised me as "some geezer on the internet" comparing me unfavourably with a couple in your imagination.
Do you not see how that is aggressive and unpleasant?
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
I have literally just written "and he's probably got a point". And where am I being unpleasant? I am simply pointing out that the couple will see it as making sense on a microeconomic level regardless of the macroeconomic implications. Do you see my point?
You derided and dehumanised me as "some geezer on the internet" comparing me unfavourably with a couple in your imagination.
Do you not see how that is aggressive and unpleasant?
I happily identify as some geezer on the internet. FWIW.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
A Republican effort to lock down all of Nebraska’s electoral votes for former President Donald Trump appeared doomed Monday when a state lawmaker denied backers his crucial support for the move.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
So you're saying that all that 'enhanced' paperwork, that banks now are required to require from us, is a completely useless waste of our time ?
That paperwork and the bank generally saying no is reserved for small businesses, not the important customers who can skip all the nonsense that the secret department for terrorism, drugs and money laundering creates via it's actions that inevitably create more regulation and paperwork for the little guys.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
Apply it to UK government tax income of £0.83tr gives a borrowing figure of £5tr. We're only half way there at £2.7tr. Plenty of headroom.
The normal rule of thumb is that a household should try not to spend more than one-third of their income on rent/mortgage payments.
Do you really think it would be sensible for one-third of government tax revenue to be spent on servicing the national debt? What spending would you cut to afford the extra £bns of debt interest payments?
I wouldn't need to cut spending. The return from the investment from the extra borrowing should more than cover the extra interest. That's the point. You invest to get a return much in excess of the borrowing costs.
Remember that the investment provides an immediate return in terms of the extra income tax and corporation tax paid by the recipients of the investment. Then there is the longer term return from the extra growth enabled by the investment.
Government spending is not analogous to a household budget. It's a common error to make that assumption.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
That's a coherent position of course once we've defined "trivial". There are instances where the Head of Government, rather than the Head of State, participates in events as part of that role and I presume you've no objection to those. An example the Chancellor gives the Mansion House Speech and presumably gets dinner, do they accept that as a "gift" or as part of the function of their duties? The latter, I believe.
Your last two paragraphs are very close to my view on this and why we need more than free speech, we need fair speech. The problem looking at it the other way is it also enables false accusations or allegations to be made with reputational and emotional damage to the innocent party.
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Topping, for me issue is how selective they are on what is and is not insulting, decided by some total arsehole
Fortunately, at management level, in this country, total arseholes are in surplus. Which means reasonable rates.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
So you're saying that all that 'enhanced' paperwork, that banks now are required to require from us, is a completely useless waste of our time ?
I wouldn’t say useless, it pays my salary.
"There is no money left".
Joe and Joanna Millennial purchase a broom cupboard bedsit with mortgage on 6x joint salary, have to fill out extensive forms on source of funds and obtain in writing that bank of grandparents and bank of mum and dad that gifted the deposit have no financial claim on the property. Associate of Russian Oligarch / Colombian drug lord buying a Mayfair apartment for £10m in cash... no questions.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
So you're saying that all that 'enhanced' paperwork, that banks now are required to require from us, is a completely useless waste of our time ?
I wouldn’t say useless, it pays my salary.
"There is no money left".
Joe and Joanna Millennial purchase a broom cupboard bedsit with mortgage on 6x joint salary, have to fill out extensive forms on source of funds and obtain in writing that bank of grandparents and bank of mum and dad that gifted the deposit have no financial claim on the property. Associate of Russian Oligarch / Colombian drug lord buying a Mayfair apartment for £10m in cash... no questions.
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
So you're saying that all that 'enhanced' paperwork, that banks now are required to require from us, is a completely useless waste of our time ?
I wouldn’t say useless, it pays my salary.
I'd better refrain from further comment, then.
I still recall the comic discussions on PB
- Browns regulations are/were utterly useless - so you are in favour of a demented free for all - No, we need regulations that actually do something - But regulations are good. And these are regulations - ….
Mr. Romford, I broadly agree with that but would argue that there's another dimension here which is that diet is incredibly important, particularly for growing children. Imposing a vegan/vegetarian diet on people against their will is not a good thing.
Biggest problem for most primary school headteachers regarding food is
1) has the child had breakfast 2) is the child getting lunch
I've long advocated the simple solution - work towards all schools providing breakfast, lunch and probably diner. Aside from feeding the hungry, the effect on parents who actually care will also be massive - the current school day doesn't take into account both parents working.
Provide beds too and you’ve got a boarding school.
Everything is correct but it turns schools from places of education to the National Babysitting Service, massively aiding better off parents so both can keep their high-powered and no doubt lucrative careers.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
Apply it to UK government tax income of £0.83tr gives a borrowing figure of £5tr. We're only half way there at £2.7tr. Plenty of headroom.
The normal rule of thumb is that a household should try not to spend more than one-third of their income on rent/mortgage payments.
Do you really think it would be sensible for one-third of government tax revenue to be spent on servicing the national debt? What spending would you cut to afford the extra £bns of debt interest payments?
I wouldn't need to cut spending. The return from the investment from the extra borrowing should more than cover the extra interest. That's the point. You invest to get a return much in excess of the borrowing costs.
Remember that the investment provides an immediate return in terms of the extra income tax and corporation tax paid by the recipients of the investment. Then there is the longer term return from the extra growth enabled by the investment.
Government spending is not analogous to a household budget. It's a common error to make that assumption.
I agree that the finances of a country are different to those of an individual, but I do not agree that all deficit-spending necessarily generates an increase in growth that pays for itself, or that it means there is no limit to how much a country can borrow.
In the specifics of the here and now, the debt incurred during the pandemic needs to be repaid so that Britain can borrow again for the next crisis.
There's also a big question mark about what happens to assumptions about borrowing to generate growth when the global population starts to decline, and growth becomes harder to generate. We're on the cusp of a very different world and economy.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I listened to a long immersive podcast on it, Iran 79, a couple of years ago. I'd recommend it but can't recall the title. It was a BBC one, I think. Anyway, it was very good.
Mr. Romford, I broadly agree with that but would argue that there's another dimension here which is that diet is incredibly important, particularly for growing children. Imposing a vegan/vegetarian diet on people against their will is not a good thing.
Biggest problem for most primary school headteachers regarding food is
1) has the child had breakfast 2) is the child getting lunch
I've long advocated the simple solution - work towards all schools providing breakfast, lunch and probably diner. Aside from feeding the hungry, the effect on parents who actually care will also be massive - the current school day doesn't take into account both parents working.
Provide beds too and you’ve got a boarding school.
Everything is correct but it turns schools from places of education to the National Babysitting Service, massively aiding better off parents so both can keep their high-powered and no doubt lucrative careers.
Well, the government currently say that both parents have a moral duty to work full time. And created an economic and housing structure that pretty much forces that.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
That's a coherent position of course once we've defined "trivial". There are instances where the Head of Government, rather than the Head of State, participates in events as part of that role and I presume you've no objection to those. An example the Chancellor gives the Mansion House Speech and presumably gets dinner, do they accept that as a "gift" or as part of the function of their duties? The latter, I believe.
Your last two paragraphs are very close to my view on this and why we need more than free speech, we need fair speech. The problem looking at it the other way is it also enables false accusations or allegations to be made with reputational and emotional damage to the innocent party.
Yes. As head of government, ministers etc they get all sorts of duties, some irksome, some pleasant. That runs with the job, though not every invitation is appropriate to accept.
It is an essential difference between the UK now and our own pre-Victorian history, and much of the world in abroadland, that public servants are servants not masters, and they are remunerated by salary etc, not by private perks (for example Samuel Pepys made himself wealthy on what we would call corruption, but was then normal), and that the job is its own reward, with additionally the reputation and skill they can bring to the market place after that phase of their career.
As to trivial, as chair of governors for many years of a school with a turnover of 6-7 million, I did once get given a jar of jam and a packet of biscuits at Christmas.
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Not like you to miss the obvious parallel with drag queens which are on the other side of the partisan divide when it comes to acceptability.
In the USA perhaps, but men dressing up as women is such a staple of British humour that I'm not sure anyone bats an eyelid at it.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I listened to a long immersive podcast on it, Iran 79, a couple of years ago. I'd recommend it but can't recall the title. It was a BBC one, I think. Anyway, it was very good.
I'll try and find it. I've long felt that, as far as Iran is concerned it's a classic example of Western meddlers getting what they deserve.
I'm on a Teams call with various public sector types from various organisations. The conversation keeps drifting off topic to mock the Labour Party.
I'm vaguely astonished. For the last 30 years, in the circles I've moved in, nobody has mocked the Labour Party. I had put it down to an inherent left-wing lean among the types of people I interacted with - young (well, this was true 20 years ago), urban, public sector/public sector adjacent, northern types simply didn't mock the Labour party unless they knew each other very well - it was only one step away from admitting support for the Conservative Party. This was true whether Labour or Conservatives were in power. I do remember one rather good joke from my brother-in-law about Gordon Brown 15 years ago, but that was notable more for its rarity.
Yet two months into a Labour government they are already the subject of ridicule. Even Boris got more leeway than this at the start.
I'm not for a moment claiming that people are clamouring for the return of Rishi. But as TSE noted yesterday, I've never known a PM take over to such a lack of enthusiasm. Even Liz Truss got a bit of early credit for the way she handled Lizzydeath (though obviously spaffed away what little political credit she had with the minibudget, and SKS has already outlasted her).
Ooh, update, a brief joke about Liz Truss. And now more eyerolling about Labour "maybe if we bung them a pair of glasses they might be convinced".
I am shocked, HSBC who used to be the bankers of choice for terrorists and drug dealers, things haven’t changed since 2012 when the were fined $1.9 billion for this type of fail.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
So you're saying that all that 'enhanced' paperwork, that banks now are required to require from us, is a completely useless waste of our time ?
I wouldn’t say useless, it pays my salary.
I'd better refrain from further comment, then.
I still recall the comic discussions on PB
- Browns regulations are/were utterly useless - so you are in favour of a demented free for all - No, we need regulations that actually do something - But regulations are good. And these are regulations - ….
Brown was also the Chancellor who disastrously blurred the line between current spending and investment. In the news again, as Reeves has just noticed that might be a problem for her, and is planning to redraw it.
I see Kemi is now being thrown under the bus for defending Labour politicians accepting gifts. I mean, she is just being fair and honest because politicians of ALL parties accept gifts and have done for years. The point is that they declare them. I and others have been saying this repeatedly on here (and used Kemi as an example days ago) but only now do the Herd click.
Fair play to Kemi for saying it, but she is no different to most other MPs in accept gifts (which are a trivially google-able matter of public record).
You keep on ignoring that repeatedly SKS declares gifts late, and it looks as though Rayner has (at best) incorrectly declared them.
Sort your own side out.
Again – AGAIN! – you (deliberately?) misrepresent me. It's a good idea to check someone's posts before you accuse them of hypocrisy or deliberate omission. I have literally said – time and again on here – that Sir Keir made an error by declaring Lady Vic's clothing allowance late. I wrote that many times without prompting from you or anyone else.
He did declare that when he realised his mistake and – crucially – before there was any media interest, but yes it was late nevertheless.
But I have written that numerous times. Can't you read?
I can. You may also note that you ignored that in your previous comment above. And it's an 'error' he's made at least two times over the years.
You said: "The point is that they declare them."
My point is that they should declare them fully, properly, and in time. SKS does not. Why not? Is it incompetence, contempt, or corruption? I doubt it's the latter, but the other two options are not much better. It's not a good look, is it?
(I have sympathy if, as I believe has happened in the past, an MP asks for clarification on whether something should be declared, and the relevant authorities fail to get a response in time. But that wasn't the case with SKS AIUI.)
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
Well yes, and good for you. Unfortunately you are doing it by advocating for an authoritarian cheese-paring curtain-twitching government
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
Apply it to UK government tax income of £0.83tr gives a borrowing figure of £5tr. We're only half way there at £2.7tr. Plenty of headroom.
The normal rule of thumb is that a household should try not to spend more than one-third of their income on rent/mortgage payments.
Do you really think it would be sensible for one-third of government tax revenue to be spent on servicing the national debt? What spending would you cut to afford the extra £bns of debt interest payments?
I wouldn't need to cut spending. The return from the investment from the extra borrowing should more than cover the extra interest. That's the point. You invest to get a return much in excess of the borrowing costs.
Remember that the investment provides an immediate return in terms of the extra income tax and corporation tax paid by the recipients of the investment. Then there is the longer term return from the extra growth enabled by the investment.
Government spending is not analogous to a household budget. It's a common error to make that assumption.
I agree that the finances of a country are different to those of an individual, but I do not agree that all deficit-spending necessarily generates an increase in growth that pays for itself, or that it means there is no limit to how much a country can borrow.
In the specifics of the here and now, the debt incurred during the pandemic needs to be repaid so that Britain can borrow again for the next crisis.
There's also a big question mark about what happens to assumptions about borrowing to generate growth when the global population starts to decline, and growth becomes harder to generate. We're on the cusp of a very different world and economy.
All your points are good ones.
Not all deficit-spending necessarily generates an increase in growth that pays for itself. I agree. Borrowing to pay pensions doesn't increase growth. I'm very suspicious of borrowing to cut taxes in the belief that will create sufficient growth to pay for itself.
There is a limit to how much a country can borrow. Of course there is a limit. You need to stop well short of the limit to avoid a death spiral. The argument is about what is the limit.
The debt incurred during the pandemic needs to be repaid so that Britain can borrow again for the next crisis. I agree with the general Keynesian point of borrowing to repair the roof and repaying when the sun is shining again. But I'm not sure the sun is shining again.
Your point about the global population starting to decline, and growth becoming harder to generate is a good one but it will be a few years before the global population is forecast to actually decline. When it does it will have profound implications, not only for government spending, but for private sector investment, stock markets, public services etc. A big topic.
But my post was to address your original question "What spending would you cut to afford the extra £bns of debt interest payments? "
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Not like you to miss the obvious parallel with drag queens which are on the other side of the partisan divide when it comes to acceptability.
In the USA perhaps, but men dressing up as women is such a staple of British humour that I'm not sure anyone bats an eyelid at it.
Mm - but arguably you could have said the same about blackface up until the 1970s. Think the Black and White Minstrel show, and indeed Curry and Chips, neither of which came out of nowhere.
FWIW I'm not particularly keen on either. But I don't know whether that's for reasons of sensitivity or because of my own small peculiarity that cosmetics give me the ick.
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
On topic, the British Museum Silk Road exhibition introduced me to this long lost civilisation. Iranian influence goes back a long way.
..Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then was annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would continue to change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate and the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana.
The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centered on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects, Yaghnobi, is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. It was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the First Turkic Khaganate's court languages for writing documents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia
I'm on a Teams call with various public sector types from various organisations. The conversation keeps drifting off topic to mock the Labour Party.
I'm vaguely astonished. For the last 30 years, in the circles I've moved in, nobody has mocked the Labour Party. I had put it down to an inherent left-wing lean among the types of people I interacted with - young (well, this was true 20 years ago), urban, public sector/public sector adjacent, northern types simply didn't mock the Labour party unless they knew each other very well - it was only one step away from admitting support for the Conservative Party. This was true whether Labour or Conservatives were in power. I do remember one rather good joke from my brother-in-law about Gordon Brown 15 years ago, but that was notable more for its rarity.
Yet two months into a Labour government they are already the subject of ridicule. Even Boris got more leeway than this at the start.
I'm not for a moment claiming that people are clamouring for the return of Rishi. But as TSE noted yesterday, I've never known a PM take over to such a lack of enthusiasm. Even Liz Truss got a bit of early credit for the way she handled Lizzydeath (though obviously spaffed away what little political credit she had with the minibudget, and SKS has already outlasted her).
Ooh, update, a brief joke about Liz Truss. And now more eyerolling about Labour "maybe if we bung them a pair of glasses they might be convinced".
It was winning the Bishop Auckland seat back that did it!
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
That's a coherent position of course once we've defined "trivial". There are instances where the Head of Government, rather than the Head of State, participates in events as part of that role and I presume you've no objection to those. An example the Chancellor gives the Mansion House Speech and presumably gets dinner, do they accept that as a "gift" or as part of the function of their duties? The latter, I believe.
Your last two paragraphs are very close to my view on this and why we need more than free speech, we need fair speech. The problem looking at it the other way is it also enables false accusations or allegations to be made with reputational and emotional damage to the innocent party.
Yes. As head of government, ministers etc they get all sorts of duties, some irksome, some pleasant. That runs with the job, though not every invitation is appropriate to accept.
It is an essential difference between the UK now and our own pre-Victorian history, and much of the world in abroadland, that public servants are servants not masters, and they are remunerated by salary etc, not by private perks (for example Samuel Pepys made himself wealthy on what we would call corruption, but was then normal), and that the job is its own reward, with additionally the reputation and skill they can bring to the market place after that phase of their career.
As to trivial, as chair of governors for many years of a school with a turnover of 6-7 million, I did once get given a jar of jam and a packet of biscuits at Christmas.
We had a chair of governors who was C something O at a Big company: he used to provide small gifts to staff (bottles of something sparkling at Christmas etc.) rather than expecting to be given anything.
On topic, the British Museum Silk Road exhibition introduced me to this long lost civilisation. Iranian influence goes back a long way.
..Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then was annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would continue to change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate and the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana.
The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centered on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects, Yaghnobi, is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. It was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the First Turkic Khaganate's court languages for writing documents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia
I find that part of the world fascinating, not least because it seems so inhospitable a spot for a civilisation. The Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yangtze - all seem obvious cradles for great empires. Fertile, massive agricultural surpluses, dense populations... The impression I get of Persia and Central Asia is of a hot, dry, mountainous desert. I've never been, and I'm sure there are nuances here - but whenever I see it it doesn't look a sustaining landscape. Yet clearly it is, at least to some extent.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
Well yes, and good for you. Unfortunately you are doing it by advocating for an authoritarian cheese-paring curtain-twitching government
Hmm, ok, noted. But I do think we should wait for a few policies and outcomes before writing the book.
Anyway, off to the Red Wall now. I might be some time.
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Not like you to miss the obvious parallel with drag queens which are on the other side of the partisan divide when it comes to acceptability.
In the USA perhaps, but men dressing up as women is such a staple of British humour that I'm not sure anyone bats an eyelid at it.
Mm - but arguably you could have said the same about blackface up until the 1970s. Think the Black and White Minstrel show, and indeed Curry and Chips, neither of which came out of nowhere.
FWIW I'm not particularly keen on either. But I don't know whether that's for reasons of sensitivity or because of my own small peculiarity that cosmetics give me the ick.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
Well yes, and good for you. Unfortunately you are doing it by advocating for an authoritarian cheese-paring curtain-twitching government
Hmm, ok, noted. But I do think we should wait for a few policies and outcomes before writing the book.
Anyway, off to the Red Wall now. I might be some time.
On topic, the British Museum Silk Road exhibition introduced me to this long lost civilisation. Iranian influence goes back a long way.
..Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then was annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would continue to change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate and the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana.
The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centered on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects, Yaghnobi, is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. It was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the First Turkic Khaganate's court languages for writing documents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia
I find that part of the world fascinating, not least because it seems so inhospitable a spot for a civilisation. The Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yangtze - all seem obvious cradles for great empires. Fertile, massive agricultural surpluses, dense populations... The impression I get of Persia and Central Asia is of a hot, dry, mountainous desert. I've never been, and I'm sure there are nuances here - but whenever I see it it doesn't look a sustaining landscape. Yet clearly it is, at least to some extent.
I think there’s also been a bit of climate change in the intervening thousands of years.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I listened to a long immersive podcast on it, Iran 79, a couple of years ago. I'd recommend it but can't recall the title. It was a BBC one, I think. Anyway, it was very good.
I'll try and find it. I've long felt that, as far as Iran is concerned it's a classic example of Western meddlers getting what they deserve.
When you say Western Powers, you mean Britain, who refused to split oil profits 50/50 in the early 1950's (against USA advice) and began an embargo.
It was Britain that egged on the USA and CIA to get involved in a coup that saw the Shah return.
Maybe got what "we" deserved. but what about the people of Iran ?
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
I have literally just written "and he's probably got a point". And where am I being unpleasant? I am simply pointing out that the couple will see it as making sense on a microeconomic level regardless of the macroeconomic implications. Do you see my point?
You derided and dehumanised me as "some geezer on the internet" comparing me unfavourably with a couple in your imagination.
Do you not see how that is aggressive and unpleasant?
I happily identify as some geezer on the internet. FWIW.
Indeed, me too. What an extraordinary and extreme reaction from Mr Password!
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
£25,000 take home pay is £1772.58, repayments on a 25 yr £300k @ 5% are £1754 - so if a couple is earning £25k each then that means the entirety of someone's pay are virtually swallowed whole in mortgage payments if a 25 year term is taken !
Yup. So you have, in effect, doubled the redundancy risk to the mortgage. As a start.
I'm not sure that's completely bonkers in some circumstance.
My wife and I could live fairly comfortably on £20k/year outside of housing costs. So provided we didn't have kids (there's the rub), we could fairly easily both bring in £25k/year, and sustain a mortgage of that size. Inflation will do its wicked work, so a repayment of £1750 a month now won't feel so bad in 10 years time.
Not much reserve in the system, but presumably you'd be sat on an asset worth £350-400k, so if things went south you'd have to sell up and downsize.
All that said, I wouldn't do it personally - despite earning more than the example above, for the next house move, I don't really want to borrow more than £100k and probably we'll just pay cash.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I listened to a long immersive podcast on it, Iran 79, a couple of years ago. I'd recommend it but can't recall the title. It was a BBC one, I think. Anyway, it was very good.
I'll try and find it. I've long felt that, as far as Iran is concerned it's a classic example of Western meddlers getting what they deserve.
When you say Western Powers, you mean Britain, who refused to split oil profits 50/50 in the early 1950's (against USA advice) and began an embargo.
It was Britain that egged on the USA and CIA to get involved in a coup that saw the Shah return.
Maybe got what "we" deserved. but what about the people of Iran ?
Heartbreaking.
British policy in the 50's was generally conducted under the delusion that we were still the Great Power that we'd been before WWI.
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Not like you to miss the obvious parallel with drag queens which are on the other side of the partisan divide when it comes to acceptability.
In the USA perhaps, but men dressing up as women is such a staple of British humour that I'm not sure anyone bats an eyelid at it.
Mm - but arguably you could have said the same about blackface up until the 1970s. Think the Black and White Minstrel show, and indeed Curry and Chips, neither of which came out of nowhere.
FWIW I'm not particularly keen on either. But I don't know whether that's for reasons of sensitivity or because of my own small peculiarity that cosmetics give me the ick.
Not a fan of panto nor Monty Python then?
Never been a fan of panto. Python I can happily compartmentalise.
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
Well yes, and good for you. Unfortunately you are doing it by advocating for an authoritarian cheese-paring curtain-twitching government
Hmm, ok, noted. But I do think we should wait for a few policies and outcomes before writing the book.
Anyway, off to the Red Wall now. I might be some time.
That sounds a bit like Oates! You are coming back, not sacrificing yourself to the red wall in an attempt to raise the chances of the rest of the Labour party surviving?
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
Are you volunteering to do so?
I will do so.
As a former boss said of me ‘He’s very good at drowning kittens.’ which I am assured was a compliment.
On topic, the British Museum Silk Road exhibition introduced me to this long lost civilisation. Iranian influence goes back a long way.
..Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then was annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would continue to change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate and the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana.
The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centered on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects, Yaghnobi, is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. It was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the First Turkic Khaganate's court languages for writing documents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia
I find that part of the world fascinating, not least because it seems so inhospitable a spot for a civilisation. The Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yangtze - all seem obvious cradles for great empires. Fertile, massive agricultural surpluses, dense populations... The impression I get of Persia and Central Asia is of a hot, dry, mountainous desert. I've never been, and I'm sure there are nuances here - but whenever I see it it doesn't look a sustaining landscape. Yet clearly it is, at least to some extent.
Much was, I think (?), as can be implied from this 10thC Persian describing Samarkand. ...I know no place in it or in Samarkand itself where if one ascends some elevated ground one does not see greenery and a pleasant place, and nowhere near it are mountains lacking in trees or a dusty steppe... Samakandian Sogd... [extends] eight days travel through unbroken greenery and gardens... . The greenery of the trees and sown land extends along both sides of the river [Sogd]... and beyond these fields is pasture for flocks. Every town and settlement has a fortress... It is the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah; in it are the best trees and fruits, in every home are gardens, cisterns and flowing water...
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
Are you volunteering to do so?
I will do so.
As a former boss said of me ‘He’s very good at drowning kittens.’ which I am assured was a compliment.
A former boss, ex-Goldmans, accused me of being greedy in a salary negotiation.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
That is the exact mentality that led to 2008
If they have steady jobs - what happens if one of them loses their job? Or has to give it up to care for a family member? Or gets sick?
They can afford the monthly payments - interest rates are still very low, historically. What happens if they go up? In the next 20 years.
I got a 100% mortgage in the mid-00s. It worked me and my wife, so I'm loathe to moralise about others. The alternative is paying someone else's home loan at probably greater expense.
It’s not about moralising. It’s about risk management.
To a large extent, house prices are a function of what you can borrow. Increasing borrowing, like this, just allows house prices to rise further.
And creates an increased vulnerability for the people borrowing and the financial system.
That's a matter for the lender(s). I'm saying that if I were part of a young couple in those circumstances, I'd almost certainly go for it. Who can blame them? It's a better deal for them than renting.
It's good for the lender in the short term (More money lent = more customers, more income) and good for the couple (Can get on the ladder) - but it creates major issues and systemic risk long term as @Malmesbury and @LostPassword have pointed out. The next lever I guess that banks might pull is never actually worrying about the capital of a mortgage to be paid off for owner occupiers once a certain LTV is reached (This might already be the case, it's something I personally won't be looking at when I remortgage shortly though !)
The banks could perhaps parcel up their high risk property finance book and sell it off as bonds, rinse and repeat, thus freeing up capacity to make ever more and ever more riskier loans. Those bonds could then be hedged for credit risk in the CDS market so that investors are protected against default. And the income stream from the sellers of the CDSs could in turn be securitized and offered as bonds, which could in turn be hedged via CDS, kind of derivative upon derivative, meaning each £1 of original retail mortgage finance ends up supporting lots of capital markets activity and numerous assets and liabilities on many many balance sheets across the sector. Everyone a winner.
Ah, thank god for “The Big Short” allowing everyone to sound seemingly intelligent about the sub prime crisis.
Oi, snide little twat. I was in the thick of it. It's one of the few things I know more than the average bear about.
Haha! Sorry Kinabalu, so it was all your fault?
Yup. And before that I had a specialism in facilitating PFI contracts. My hands are as dirty as they come.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
Well yes, and good for you. Unfortunately you are doing it by advocating for an authoritarian cheese-paring curtain-twitching government
Hmm, ok, noted. But I do think we should wait for a few policies and outcomes before writing the book.
Anyway, off to the Red Wall now. I might be some time.
Nationwide - The new deals will enable a couple earning £50,000 between them to borrow £300,000.
6 * joint salary is absolute madness lol.
If they have steady jobs and can afford the monthly payments what’s the problem? Better than paying the same/more in rent and paying off someone else’s home loan
Take home pay for a couple both earning £25k is £3,582 per month. The lowest monthly repayment on £300k mortgage from Nationwide is £1,607 pcm, or 45% of post-tax income.
This is one reason the economy is doing so badly in Britain. Too much of people's income is being spent on housing.
So says 'Lost Password', the geezer on the internet. And, he's probably got a point. But a young couple who want their own home aren't going to worry too much about 'the economy' are they? They just want their own home that they can paint and furnish and start a life together, without paying some chiselling landlord even more in rent each month to do fuck-all (but moan when they put some shelves up).
I'm a real person too, also looking to buy a house in the near future. There's no need to be unpleasant about this to me.
If house prices were one-third lower the putative couple could buy their house with mortgage repayments less than one-third of their income and they'd have more money leftover for other parts of the economy.
Same with lower rents.
I'm not saying the couple are wrong to take Nationwide up on their offer, but that, as a society, Britain has gone seriously wrong that it is necessary for them to do so.
So you understand my point?
I have literally just written "and he's probably got a point". And where am I being unpleasant? I am simply pointing out that the couple will see it as making sense on a microeconomic level regardless of the macroeconomic implications. Do you see my point?
You derided and dehumanised me as "some geezer on the internet" comparing me unfavourably with a couple in your imagination.
Do you not see how that is aggressive and unpleasant?
I happily identify as some geezer on the internet. FWIW.
Indeed, me too. What an extraordinary and extreme reaction from Mr Password!
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
Are you volunteering to do so?
I will do so.
As a former boss said of me ‘He’s very good at drowning kittens.’ which I am assured was a compliment.
Talking of which I saw this on Twitter recently in a thread about dark content in TV shows for kids.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
@Garethofthevale - thanks, read it now, very interesting. I'd say the 1979 revolution was in the top tier of 20th century events for momentousness. It'd be great if we could soon see the world's first (I think?) female-led countrywide revolution knocking over the oppressive patriarchy that has sadly been the result of the 79 one. Fantasy, I guess.
Very much agree. I think that the 1979 Iranian revolution will go down, when the historians are able to dig into it, as a monumental failure of American covert intervention.
I listened to a long immersive podcast on it, Iran 79, a couple of years ago. I'd recommend it but can't recall the title. It was a BBC one, I think. Anyway, it was very good.
I'll try and find it. I've long felt that, as far as Iran is concerned it's a classic example of Western meddlers getting what they deserve.
When you say Western Powers, you mean Britain, who refused to split oil profits 50/50 in the early 1950's (against USA advice) and began an embargo.
It was Britain that egged on the USA and CIA to get involved in a coup that saw the Shah return.
Maybe got what "we" deserved. but what about the people of Iran ?
Heartbreaking.
British policy in the 50's was generally conducted under the delusion that we were still the Great Power that we'd been before WWI.
Post WWI, surely ? I don't think the Foreign Office was quite so delusional as that.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
I would be quite happy with that as an alternative or as well.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
So if I were a Lib Dem party member and wanted to donate £1000 to the Party, I couldn't? No, this is nonsense.
Political parties in the modern age, just like any other "business", need money to exist. There's only so much volunteers can do and that's more about the on-ground campaigning.
The parties aren't the problem - if the only people who could run for office were the wealthy who could afford to, we'd have a pretty unrepresentative democracy. We need to make it much easier for people with low amounts of time and money to get involved in the political process.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
I agree this question is difficult. The actual problem I was addressing is that of individual enrichment rather than party coffers. To that second question the first answer I have is the one no-one thinks can be done: The return to individual mass membership of parties.
Until that day, the second best is absolute transparency about donations to parties and a culture which takes for granted that general political support is morally unrelated to personal enrichment whether it is a business, a union or an individual.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
That's a coherent position of course once we've defined "trivial". There are instances where the Head of Government, rather than the Head of State, participates in events as part of that role and I presume you've no objection to those. An example the Chancellor gives the Mansion House Speech and presumably gets dinner, do they accept that as a "gift" or as part of the function of their duties? The latter, I believe.
Your last two paragraphs are very close to my view on this and why we need more than free speech, we need fair speech. The problem looking at it the other way is it also enables false accusations or allegations to be made with reputational and emotional damage to the innocent party.
Yes. As head of government, ministers etc they get all sorts of duties, some irksome, some pleasant. That runs with the job, though not every invitation is appropriate to accept.
It is an essential difference between the UK now and our own pre-Victorian history, and much of the world in abroadland, that public servants are servants not masters, and they are remunerated by salary etc, not by private perks (for example Samuel Pepys made himself wealthy on what we would call corruption, but was then normal), and that the job is its own reward, with additionally the reputation and skill they can bring to the market place after that phase of their career.
As to trivial, as chair of governors for many years of a school with a turnover of 6-7 million, I did once get given a jar of jam and a packet of biscuits at Christmas.
We had a chair of governors who was C something O at a Big company: he used to provide small gifts to staff (bottles of something sparkling at Christmas etc.) rather than expecting to be given anything.
There was an organisation that I am only indirectly involved in now, it was a care home run as a charity. The board all used to get turkeys at christmas, the accounting was regularly that a new set of curtains and televisions were of greater numbers than actually ended up in the homes. The board was made of appointed councillors from the local county council.
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Quite. A party entitled "Come as your favourite cricketer" would seem that dressing as Sir Viv, putting on make up to try to look like him ought to be reasonable. As would be a black cricketer adopting white make up and a huge beard to be WG Grace.
If the person is pretending to be black as an insult its a different thing.
Culture moves on and what is generally accepted moves on. I am not a fan of judging historical events and people by the mores of today, be that an 18th C trader whose portfolio included the triangular trade or a cricketer at a party 10 years ago.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I'd find it quite insulting if someone offered to buy me a suit.
Indeed and even worse for a man to offer to buy your wife's dresses
I have a theory (which is probably bollocks) that Alli probably had a fling with Lady Vicky, and is just buying her silence.
I suggest you do some rudimentary research on Lord Alli before posting this nonsense.
From LV's perspective though, from the rumours it could be a "spite shag".
Oh come on, I dislike Starmer loads, don’t like Labour at all but we surely aren’t going here with twisted gossip about politicians wives who cannot defend themselves and frankly shouldn’t have this sort of shot thrown around about them.
The theoretical advantage - if it could be made to work reliably on a large scale - is much cheaper (another order of magnitude or so) cost to get mass into orbit.
- The payload is very, very limited. - And has to not mind 30,000g - And if you want to got to orbit, requires building a rocket motor into the projectile. - A rocket engine that doesn’t mind 30,000g
Then end result is system that can send very small quantities of something very, very tough (like water). By the time you are building high performance rocket engines into the projectiles, it’s not cheap anymore.
Useful for range testing of defences against very high speed missiles, possibly, though
See SpinLaunch…
Whilst true, Rocket-Assisted Projectiles (see Excalibur) already can withstand 10=15,000 G forces when launched form a conventional artillery piece. Yes, the scale is not the same, but it shows that rockets ad electronics can be made to withstand vast g-forces.
Sure - Bull was firing rocket assisted projectiles into space in the 50s. The problem is that by the time you are looking at an orbital capable projectile, most of your payload is rocket motor. And then the payload has to be resistant to the forces.
The Babylon Gun was going to have payload to LEO of maybe 50kg
There are no 10,000G forces involved.
...Multi-injection guns like Longshot’s current prototype spread the acceleration of the projectile out over time, but have a similar top speed to a traditional cannon. The speed is limited by the top speed of the gas, which is determined by the gas composition and temperature. For room temperature nitrogen, this is a maximum of just over Mach 4 - about one sixth the speed needed for space launch.
By moving the system to the desert, Longshot can use hydrogen as the accelerant gas. By extending the length of the barrel to 500+ meters and adding more boosters, Longshot will be able to accelerate payloads of up to 100 KG to Mach 5+ at acceleration loads that your cell phone can survive, and at prices significantly lower than current rocket-based accelerators systems...
Note, this is a technology development project. If it's possible to scale up, it could be used to launch raw materials into orbit at low cost. That could make near earth space manufacturing an economically interesting idea.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
Agreed (on the principle, but possibly not the limit). The alternative is to allow multi millionaires or large corporates to dominate political influence.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
Yes, all information about political parties should come from the media, with no limit on the amount of resources the media can spend on that. And the political parties must not be allowed to counter any lies the media put out.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I'd find it quite insulting if someone offered to buy me a suit.
Indeed and even worse for a man to offer to buy your wife's dresses
I have a theory (which is probably bollocks) that Alli probably had a fling with Lady Vicky, and is just buying her silence.
I suggest you do some rudimentary research on Lord Alli before posting this nonsense.
From LV's perspective though, from the rumours it could be a "spite shag".
Oh come on, I dislike Starmer loads, don’t like Labour at all but we surely aren’t going here with twisted gossip about politicians wives who cannot defend themselves and frankly shouldn’t have this sort of shot thrown around about them.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I'd find it quite insulting if someone offered to buy me a suit.
Indeed and even worse for a man to offer to buy your wife's dresses
I have a theory (which is probably bollocks) that Alli probably had a fling with Lady Vicky, and is just buying her silence.
I suggest you do some rudimentary research on Lord Alli before posting this nonsense.
From LV's perspective though, from the rumours it could be a "spite shag".
Oh come on, I dislike Starmer loads, don’t like Labour at all but we surely aren’t going here with twisted gossip about politicians wives who cannot defend themselves and frankly shouldn’t have this sort of shot thrown around about them.
Grim stuff.
Particularly when Lord Alli is gay.
I would edit my post to remove the reference about LV, but I'm unable to. And I had no idea about Lord Alli.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
So if I were a Lib Dem party member and wanted to donate £1000 to the Party, I couldn't? No, this is nonsense.
Political parties in the modern age, just like any other "business", need money to exist. There's only so much volunteers can do and that's more about the on-ground campaigning.
The parties aren't the problem - if the only people who could run for office were the wealthy who could afford to, we'd have a pretty unrepresentative democracy. We need to make it much easier for people with low amounts of time and money to get involved in the political process.
It's the same principle as that internet adage that if you aren't paying for it, you are the product not the customer.
As an electorate, we expect certain things to "just happen". We expect parties to come up with coherent plans, we expect them to communicate them (consider how outraged people get when they don't even get a leaflet). We might not say that expect politicians and their spouses to dress with a degree of snazziness, but overall we tend to reward those who do.
Someone has to pay for all that, even on the fairly frugal basis that UK politics runs on. And it will tend to be rich donors, because that's where the money is.
Same with newspapers. Most of them aren't strictly commercial propositions any more, so they exist because someone wealthy wants the pulpit for themselves or their cause.
The FBI confirms, again, that Trump is a liar: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-crime-in-the-nation-statistics Serious crime in the US is falling and has been for a while, since an upward blip during Covid. The murder rate is down 9% and rapes are significantly down too. There is absolutely no trace of crime spiralling out of control, driven by psychotic immigrants.
Of course this won’t stop Trump from continuing to claim otherwise or his supporters believing it. It is not only Iran where the leaders have irrational beliefs.
Trump’s point is that cities like San Francisco have simply stopped recording crime below a certain level.
It’s way more nuanced than “Trump is lying”.
Nuanced. Good one.
Just admit it, he's batshit. Trump addresses women: "I am your protector. I want to be your protector ... you will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger ... you will no longer be thinking about abortion." https://x.com/atrupar/status/1838385282346844352
So you are a newcomer to political rhetoric. I wouldn't necessarily be shouting it from the rooftops.
I think that's pretty batshit. Certainly comfortably outside the normal bounds of political rhetoric.
Have you actually listened to anything that Trump has said over the past 10 (30) years?
What's your point?
My point, O Super Thicko, is that his rhetoric has proved effective in the past and he sees no reason to alter his style this time round.
That you and the other politically blind on here dismiss him and his utterings as absurd is testament to the fact that it is you who are "above the fray" and/or just not been paying attention to politics in the US these past few years.
I find his rhetoric pretty absurd. What has that got to do with it having "proved effective in the past"?
And where is your evidence that the particular quote that was highlighted is net vote winner? You can certainly make a strong case that a Republican candidate with less batshit rhetoric would be much more likely to win.
These are pretty simple points that even a 6-year-old can understand, so I can assume that you are a troll - which is obvious given that you can't answer a simple question without resorting to insults.
Look, for you and all the others commenting on it.
Trump said something ineffably Trumpish and designed to appeal to a certain US voter demographic because, you know, he's in the middle of an election campaign. And all you whingeing Guardian-adjacent liberal types on here clutch your pearls and say "how ghastly". Not quite understanding that it is electioneering in an election campaign and will either succeed or not.
Then, when called on it, you try to meta-argue the fuck out of it and shoot the messenger.
I am simply trying to point out your failings and inadequacies so for god's sake don't take it out on me.
Called on what exactly, you pompous fool?
Someone posted that Trump was lying about a wave of murders and rapes caused by other countries sending their worst prisoners to the United States. Someone else posted that it was far more nuanced because some crimes aren't recorded. Someone replied with a, if you like "Trumpish" quote they described as batshit.
So far, a mildly interesting and somewhat informative difference of opinion.
Then you come in and make nonsensical illogical complaints about people having an opinion about Trump, while offering no insight or information about anything beyond the bombshell observation that millions of people vote for Trump. It is frankly tedious that you keep up these pointless complaints, don't you have anything to say about anything?
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I'd find it quite insulting if someone offered to buy me a suit.
Indeed and even worse for a man to offer to buy your wife's dresses
I have a theory (which is probably bollocks) that Alli probably had a fling with Lady Vicky, and is just buying her silence.
I suggest you do some rudimentary research on Lord Alli before posting this nonsense.
From LV's perspective though, from the rumours it could be a "spite shag".
Oh come on, I dislike Starmer loads, don’t like Labour at all but we surely aren’t going here with twisted gossip about politicians wives who cannot defend themselves and frankly shouldn’t have this sort of shot thrown around about them.
Grim stuff.
Particularly when Lord Alli is gay.
I would edit my post to remove the reference about LV, but I'm unable to. And I had no idea about Lord Alli.
The reference to LV was literally the worst thing I have ever seen on the internet.\
What exactly is being said with blackface. I suppose it is that black people are, in and of themselves, comic objects or objects of derision. Plus the juxtaposition of someone white being something they're not.
But why is that inherently a) funny; or b) insulting.
If she had turned up as Viv Richards would that have been better or worse? What about Thor or the Black Panther.
I think the convention is that it is insulting and I am happy to go along with that but it probably needs some unpicking.
Quite. A party entitled "Come as your favourite cricketer" would seem that dressing as Sir Viv, putting on make up to try to look like him ought to be reasonable. As would be a black cricketer adopting white make up and a huge beard to be WG Grace.
If the person is pretending to be black as an insult its a different thing.
Culture moves on and what is generally accepted moves on. I am not a fan of judging historical events and people by the mores of today, be that an 18th C trader whose portfolio included the triangular trade or a cricketer at a party 10 years ago.
10 years ago is today, in cultural terms.
Is it ? MeToo only really took off in 2017, for example.
If you look overseas, the dramatic liberalisation of Taiwan only took off in 2016. Watch KDramas from 2010, and it's like something from the 1970s.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
I'd find it quite insulting if someone offered to buy me a suit.
Indeed and even worse for a man to offer to buy your wife's dresses
I have a theory (which is probably bollocks) that Alli probably had a fling with Lady Vicky, and is just buying her silence.
I suggest you do some rudimentary research on Lord Alli before posting this nonsense.
From LV's perspective though, from the rumours it could be a "spite shag".
Oh come on, I dislike Starmer loads, don’t like Labour at all but we surely aren’t going here with twisted gossip about politicians wives who cannot defend themselves and frankly shouldn’t have this sort of shot thrown around about them.
Grim stuff.
Particularly when Lord Alli is gay.
Some of the nudge nudge wink wink stuff has been pretty distasteful.
As if people can't compute the possibility that someone can just support a cause and want its standard-bearers to be the best and most effective they can be.
There have been plenty of money scandals where that hasn't been the case, but without any other evidence, it's the place to start.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Robert Colvile @rcolvile · 2h ‘It is deeply wrong for a banker/civil servant to accept dinner from a client but my Taylor Swift tickets are just fine’ does have a certain inconsistency.
Interesting. This shows the strength of the notion of "fairness" which did for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.
We know "gifts" to senior politicians have bene going on for years but now it's reached the limit of public acceptance just as proposals for cutting taxes for the very wealthy did a couple of years ago.
People want a level playing field and are tired of the "one rule for us, one rule for you" style of public life. Making politicans have the same rules as senior civil servants seems a way forward. If you want to go to a Taylor Swift concert, fine, pay for a ticket like everyone else. If you get an invite to go to Doncaster Races, fine, but declare it and ensure there's a transparent and accountable line.
Governing fairly is goign to be the challenge going forward - NOT having policies overtly favouring the people who voted for you or who support you and indeed being prepared to have policies which antagonise those groups in order to achieve something positive for the whole country.
Openness is not enough. The point of our sort of democracy is that government and parliament exist to be the servants of the poorest and least powerful to exactly the same extent as they are the servants of the well connected and wealthy, neither more nor less. It isn't possible to receive gifts more than trivial ones without incurring some sort of obligation, however unconscious.
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
OK, but who pays the bills then? Who pays for political parties to function, for candidates to campaign? What is the alternative to donations?
Leaving aside the question of do we really need political parties for democracy to function*, it would clearly be better and cheaper to fund the parties through the state than fulfil the quids for the quos of the elite donations.
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
That does lead to the problem that the people working out how much political parties get are MPs though...
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
So if I were a Lib Dem party member and wanted to donate £1000 to the Party, I couldn't? No, this is nonsense.
Political parties in the modern age, just like any other "business", need money to exist. There's only so much volunteers can do and that's more about the on-ground campaigning.
The parties aren't the problem - if the only people who could run for office were the wealthy who could afford to, we'd have a pretty unrepresentative democracy. We need to make it much easier for people with low amounts of time and money to get involved in the political process.
It's the same principle as that internet adage that if you aren't paying for it, you are the product not the customer.
As an electorate, we expect certain things to "just happen". We expect parties to come up with coherent plans, we expect them to communicate them (consider how outraged people get when they don't even get a leaflet). We might not say that expect politicians and their spouses to dress with a degree of snazziness, but overall we tend to reward those who do.
Someone has to pay for all that, even on the fairly frugal basis that UK politics runs on. And it will tend to be rich donors, because that's where the money is.
Same with newspapers. Most of them aren't strictly commercial propositions any more, so they exist because someone wealthy wants the pulpit for themselves or their cause.
Nick Robinson this morning was interesting. He said he spoke yesterday to a cabinet minister who said that they (the minister) knew that their own department wasn't making any big splash announcements pre or during conference, but had sort of assumed other departments would be. So much for The Grid.
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Has anyone pointed out that they don’t actually own the view?
Are you volunteering to do so?
I will do so.
As a former boss said of me ‘He’s very good at drowning kittens.’ which I am assured was a compliment.
The FBI confirms, again, that Trump is a liar: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-crime-in-the-nation-statistics Serious crime in the US is falling and has been for a while, since an upward blip during Covid. The murder rate is down 9% and rapes are significantly down too. There is absolutely no trace of crime spiralling out of control, driven by psychotic immigrants.
Of course this won’t stop Trump from continuing to claim otherwise or his supporters believing it. It is not only Iran where the leaders have irrational beliefs.
Trump’s point is that cities like San Francisco have simply stopped recording crime below a certain level.
It’s way more nuanced than “Trump is lying”.
You probably deserve a non rhetorical reply to that (and apologies for hijacking the thread with the Trump spat). Crime figures are almost always problematic and disputed - we see the same thing here. But the murder rate is pretty consistently reported, and hard to manipulate.
However the falling murder rate must be set against the constant improvement in medical care, saving lives that would have been lost 5, 10, 20 years ago
A flatlining murder rate is actually an increase in attempted murder
Comments
The stress tests are quite severe, it is more geared for two high earning couples who couldn’t afford to buy the dream house that their parents could on equivalent salaries.
The difference between 2007 - 09 is nobody is offering mortgages of 125% house value.
When we moved to North Wales the following year we bought a new build home for £3,250 but we couldn't afford the extra £250 for central heating
We did add it to the mortgage later, but what todays generation seems to miss is that in our day many wives stayed at home looking after their children (3 in our case) and the mortgage was based on the single earner
Indeed it is the reason my wife's state pension is just £5,250 as she only had a few years of NI contributions
... if they paid for the shoe shopping too.
If we assume future inflation at 2% then the debt repayments aren't eroded by inflation as quickly.
Yevgeny Prigozhin secretly used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments
https://www.ft.com/content/4e6062da-61b6-4f2e-8995-52793225f77e
Do you not see how that is aggressive and unpleasant?
The powerful and wealthy - I have no problem with their existence which is essential and inevitable - already have loads of help in getting their point across to government and parliament, just as they have access to the courts unlike ordinary people.
This ends up in all sorts of bad stuff, like the wealthy and well connected being protected (a late owner of Harrods comes to mind) and their victims being both legitimately afraid to speak out - the state is very powerful - and ignored when they do.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/23/state-senator-thwarts-effort-lock-down-nebraska-electoral-votes-trump-00180585
Remember that the investment provides an immediate return in terms of the extra income tax and corporation tax paid by the recipients of the investment. Then there is the longer term return from the extra growth enabled by the investment.
Government spending is not analogous to a household budget. It's a common error to make that assumption.
Your last two paragraphs are very close to my view on this and why we need more than free speech, we need fair speech. The problem looking at it the other way is it also enables false accusations or allegations to be made with reputational and emotional damage to the innocent party.
Associate of Russian Oligarch / Colombian drug lord buying a Mayfair apartment for £10m in cash... no questions.
Thank you for that. A very interesting article which I enjoyed reading. Please write more.
It annoys the hell out of me that I run a tight ship and err on the side of caution at work and then you see HSBC fucking it massively, again.
- Browns regulations are/were utterly useless
- so you are in favour of a demented free for all
- No, we need regulations that actually do something
- But regulations are good. And these are regulations
- ….
In the specifics of the here and now, the debt incurred during the pandemic needs to be repaid so that Britain can borrow again for the next crisis.
There's also a big question mark about what happens to assumptions about borrowing to generate growth when the global population starts to decline, and growth becomes harder to generate. We're on the cusp of a very different world and economy.
That's one of the reasons I'm on here busting a gut to win hearts and minds for the progressive left. Trying to balance up the ledger.
School starts at 8:30 and finishes at 3:30
No, no problem there.
It is an essential difference between the UK now and our own pre-Victorian history, and much of the world in abroadland, that public servants are servants not masters, and they are remunerated by salary etc, not by private perks (for example Samuel Pepys made himself wealthy on what we would call corruption, but was then normal), and that the job is its own reward, with additionally the reputation and skill they can bring to the market place after that phase of their career.
As to trivial, as chair of governors for many years of a school with a turnover of 6-7 million, I did once get given a jar of jam and a packet of biscuits at Christmas.
I'm vaguely astonished. For the last 30 years, in the circles I've moved in, nobody has mocked the Labour Party. I had put it down to an inherent left-wing lean among the types of people I interacted with - young (well, this was true 20 years ago), urban, public sector/public sector adjacent, northern types simply didn't mock the Labour party unless they knew each other very well - it was only one step away from admitting support for the Conservative Party. This was true whether Labour or Conservatives were in power. I do remember one rather good joke from my brother-in-law about Gordon Brown 15 years ago, but that was notable more for its rarity.
Yet two months into a Labour government they are already the subject of ridicule. Even Boris got more leeway than this at the start.
I'm not for a moment claiming that people are clamouring for the return of Rishi. But as TSE noted yesterday, I've never known a PM take over to such a lack of enthusiasm. Even Liz Truss got a bit of early credit for the way she handled Lizzydeath (though obviously spaffed away what little political credit she had with the minibudget, and SKS has already outlasted her).
Ooh, update, a brief joke about Liz Truss. And now more eyerolling about Labour "maybe if we bung them a pair of glasses they might be convinced".
You said: "The point is that they declare them."
My point is that they should declare them fully, properly, and in time. SKS does not. Why not? Is it incompetence, contempt, or corruption? I doubt it's the latter, but the other two options are not much better. It's not a good look, is it?
(I have sympathy if, as I believe has happened in the past, an MP asks for clarification on whether something should be declared, and the relevant authorities fail to get a response in time. But that wasn't the case with SKS AIUI.)
Not all deficit-spending necessarily generates an increase in growth that pays for itself. I agree. Borrowing to pay pensions doesn't increase growth. I'm very suspicious of borrowing to cut taxes in the belief that will create sufficient growth to pay for itself.
There is a limit to how much a country can borrow. Of course there is a limit. You need to stop well short of the limit to avoid a death spiral. The argument is about what is the limit.
The debt incurred during the pandemic needs to be repaid so that Britain can borrow again for the next crisis. I agree with the general Keynesian point of borrowing to repair the roof and repaying when the sun is shining again. But I'm not sure the sun is shining again.
Your point about the global population starting to decline, and growth becoming harder to generate is a good one but it will be a few years before the global population is forecast to actually decline. When it does it will have profound implications, not only for government spending, but for private sector investment, stock markets, public services etc. A big topic.
But my post was to address your original question "What spending would you cut to afford the extra £bns of debt interest payments? "
FWIW I'm not particularly keen on either. But I don't know whether that's for reasons of sensitivity or because of my own small peculiarity that cosmetics give me the ick.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/sep/23/let-them-arrest-me-actor-may-chain-herself-to-railings-over-wimbledon-plans
All this effort to save a golf course, a golf course, from being turned into tennis courts. Wimbledon Park is less than 800m from the vast expanse of Wimbledon Common.
Iranian influence goes back a long way.
..Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and listed on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. Sogdiana was first conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then was annexed by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC. It would continue to change hands under the Seleucid Empire, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Western Turkic Khaganate and the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana.
The Sogdian city-states, although never politically united, were centered on the city of Samarkand. Sogdian, an Eastern Iranian language, is no longer spoken. However, a descendant of one of its dialects, Yaghnobi, is still spoken by the Yaghnobis of Tajikistan. It was widely spoken in Central Asia as a lingua franca and served as one of the First Turkic Khaganate's court languages for writing documents...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1838490690461823119?t=3bYlcj5aGjqjAjHXfURkMg&s=19
The Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yangtze - all seem obvious cradles for great empires. Fertile, massive agricultural surpluses, dense populations... The impression I get of Persia and Central Asia is of a hot, dry, mountainous desert. I've never been, and I'm sure there are nuances here - but whenever I see it it doesn't look a sustaining landscape. Yet clearly it is, at least to some extent.
Anyway, off to the Red Wall now. I might be some time.
It was Britain that egged on the USA and CIA to get involved in a coup that saw the Shah return.
Maybe got what "we" deserved. but what about the people of Iran ?
Heartbreaking.
My wife and I could live fairly comfortably on £20k/year outside of housing costs. So provided we didn't have kids (there's the rub), we could fairly easily both bring in £25k/year, and sustain a mortgage of that size. Inflation will do its wicked work, so a repayment of £1750 a month now won't feel so bad in 10 years time.
Not much reserve in the system, but presumably you'd be sat on an asset worth £350-400k, so if things went south you'd have to sell up and downsize.
All that said, I wouldn't do it personally - despite earning more than the example above, for the next house move, I don't really want to borrow more than £100k and probably we'll just pay cash.
Not totally mad especially if you think rates are on a downward trend
As a former boss said of me ‘He’s very good at drowning kittens.’ which I am assured was a compliment.
...I know no place in it or in Samarkand itself where if one ascends some elevated ground one does not see greenery and a pleasant place, and nowhere near it are mountains lacking in trees or a dusty steppe... Samakandian Sogd... [extends] eight days travel through unbroken greenery and gardens... . The greenery of the trees and sown land extends along both sides of the river [Sogd]... and beyond these fields is pasture for flocks. Every town and settlement has a fortress... It is the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah; in it are the best trees and fruits, in every home are gardens, cisterns and flowing water...
That made me happy.
It's fabulously bleak.
Tom and Jerry and three drowned kittens no less
https://youtu.be/PvK7lut2qi0?si=O73pvq0IESjwhclU
How many years of funding could we have had just from not paying £200m to Michelle Mone?
* I would say they can help but less party influence than we have now would be beneficial and in the US they have got to the stage that losing them would be a massive improvement.
I don't think the Foreign Office was quite so delusional as that.
My solution is a low limit (so three figures) on the maximum any one person or organisation can donate to any political party, and very strict limits on campaign spending so they don't need that much anyway. If they can get volunteers to go out and talk to people or put leaflets through doors then that is sort of point...
Political parties in the modern age, just like any other "business", need money to exist. There's only so much volunteers can do and that's more about the on-ground campaigning.
The parties aren't the problem - if the only people who could run for office were the wealthy who could afford to, we'd have a pretty unrepresentative democracy. We need to make it much easier for people with low amounts of time and money to get involved in the political process.
Until that day, the second best is absolute transparency about donations to parties and a culture which takes for granted that general political support is morally unrelated to personal enrichment whether it is a business, a union or an individual.
Grim stuff.
...Multi-injection guns like Longshot’s current prototype spread the acceleration of the projectile out over time, but have a similar top speed to a traditional cannon. The speed is limited by the top speed of the gas, which is determined by the gas composition and temperature. For room temperature nitrogen, this is a maximum of just over Mach 4 - about one sixth the speed needed for space launch.
By moving the system to the desert, Longshot can use hydrogen as the accelerant gas. By extending the length of the barrel to 500+ meters and adding more boosters, Longshot will be able to accelerate payloads of up to 100 KG to Mach 5+ at acceleration loads that your cell phone can survive, and at prices significantly lower than current rocket-based accelerators systems...
Note, this is a technology development project.
If it's possible to scale up, it could be used to launch raw materials into orbit at low cost. That could make near earth space manufacturing an economically interesting idea.
The alternative is to allow multi millionaires or large corporates to dominate political influence.
As an electorate, we expect certain things to "just happen". We expect parties to come up with coherent plans, we expect them to communicate them (consider how outraged people get when they don't even get a leaflet). We might not say that expect politicians and their spouses to dress with a degree of snazziness, but overall we tend to reward those who do.
Someone has to pay for all that, even on the fairly frugal basis that UK politics runs on. And it will tend to be rich donors, because that's where the money is.
Same with newspapers. Most of them aren't strictly commercial propositions any more, so they exist because someone wealthy wants the pulpit for themselves or their cause.
Called on what exactly, you pompous fool?
Someone posted that Trump was lying about a wave of murders and rapes caused by other countries sending their worst prisoners to the United States. Someone else posted that it was far more nuanced because some crimes aren't recorded. Someone replied with a, if you like "Trumpish" quote they described as batshit.
So far, a mildly interesting and somewhat informative difference of opinion.
Then you come in and make nonsensical illogical complaints about people having an opinion about Trump, while offering no insight or information about anything beyond the bombshell observation that millions of people vote for Trump. It is frankly tedious that you keep up these pointless complaints, don't you have anything to say about anything?
She's V, L not LV.
MeToo only really took off in 2017, for example.
If you look overseas, the dramatic liberalisation of Taiwan only took off in 2016. Watch KDramas from 2010, and it's like something from the 1970s.
A decade can be a long time, culturally.
As if people can't compute the possibility that someone can just support a cause and want its standard-bearers to be the best and most effective they can be.
There have been plenty of money scandals where that hasn't been the case, but without any other evidence, it's the place to start.
A flatlining murder rate is actually an increase in attempted murder