Guest slot from Moonrabbit – politicalbetting.com
Guest slot from Moonrabbit – politicalbetting.com
After much political drama these past years, now elections are out the way, isn’t it time for a dose of honesty, not just between us, but even to ourselves?
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"The YouTuber Charlie Anderson’s most popular video, Unlock the secret steps for winning your Pip claims, had 378,000 views and offered advice for people seeking personal independence payments, which are meant to provide extra support for difficulties caused by physical or mental health conditions and disabilities.
In the video, she said: “I have a 100 per cent success rate at winning Pip claims for people because of understanding the point system and how to communicate it in a manner that then scores the points.”
She also posted templates for claims on her website as well as reviews for chargeable services of up to £950 for a personal session."
Um. So she's working then.
The combination of demographics, global insecurity, and the ongoing fallout from both the financial crash and the pandemic mean that we're in an era of big government for the foreseeable, and the Conservatives simply haven't successfully adjusted either to the world as it is now or the economic demands of their shifted electoral base.
Labour, however, risks falling between two stools, trapped by the foolish nature of the promises they made to get elected, raising enough money to tinker around the edges and annoying a lot of people in the process, while failing to make any significant transformation towards the sort of Scandinavian-style social democracy to which many of their supporters aspire.
Louise Haigh was convicted of fraud after a mobile phone that she reported to police as stolen was used to call one of her relatives, The Times has been told.
Haigh resigned as transport secretary on Thursday night after confirming that she had pleaded guilty after a police investigation involving stolen and missing phones in 2014.
Sources close to Haigh said that she reported the matter “in full” to Sir Keir Starmer when she joined the shadow cabinet in 2020.
However, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, advised her to resign when No 10 became concerned that Haigh had not revealed all the details of the conviction after a report in The Times....
...Haigh said in a statement that she was mugged during a night out in 2013. “I was a young woman and the experience was terrifying,” she said. She was said to have reported the incident to police three or four days later and had told them a man put his arm around her outside a pub, slipped off her handbag and ran off.
She gave police a list of items that she said were in her handbag, including her company phone that was supplied by her employer Aviva.
Haigh said she subsequently found the mobile phone in a drawer in her house and made a mistake by failing to inform Aviva straight away.
The Times has been told that Aviva began a formal investigation into Haigh after establishing that the stolen mobile phone was being used to call her existing contacts, including one of her relatives.
Investigations by police confirmed that the same numbers had been called by the phone before and after the report of the theft. Haigh did not respond to questions about the use of the phone when approached for comment.
A case file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service and she was charged with fraud by false representation. Haigh pleaded guilty when she appeared at Camberwell Green magistrates court in November 2014.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/louise-haighs-stolen-phone-was-used-to-call-relatives-csr3zn9pq
I agree that Labour should have done more on income-raising, and raised it from the wealthiest.
I also agree the Conservatives would have been facing all the same challenges with no consensus amongst themselves on how to deal with them.
The Government should also change the law and regulate charges and payment conditions for private car parks:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k0qlpjgk2o
Fundamentally all parties were being dishonest about the need for either significant tax rises or massive spending cuts in the run up to July, but the poisoned chalice went to Labour so they are the ones being pilloried.
Us.
I would award your thesis a first Class Honours degree. Although this is PB, and that counts for nothing if you are studying at the wrong University.
Parking is a racket, run by rogue companies. I hope the Courts pull this bunch of cowboys up short, but I'm not hopeful.
The economic situation is dominated by Brexit (we voted to be poorer). and the credit crunch aftermath. There simply isnt the money there once was.
The Tories answer was to kick the can down the road by taking one off savings from running everything down. That approach has run its course with broken roads, defence and health. We are now in a state of reckoning. No money and poor infrastructure. Labour have a tough gig.
Once Covid and Boris hit the Conservatives lost all concept of controlling public spending and it is far from clear that they would have done so had they won again. The money that was thrown at gas bills was profligate in the extreme. The headcount in public services has exploded whilst productivity has collapsed. Paying those in the public service more reduced strikes and disruption but at a very heavy cost.
Hunt did some good things, specifically increasing the reliefs available for capital spending. More should have been done in that direction and training should also have been incentivised. I have not found anything in Reeves' budget of a similar nature. She claimed she would be a Chancellor focused on growth and she certainly needs it if borrowing is to be back under control but the wish is not the act. This was not a budget for growth.
Would the Tories have done better? I can't be sure. That's a pretty sad state of affairs.
I quite often advise clients not to claim as they really don't meet the criteria. Also, to say the DWP assessments are usually quite rigorous.
Government should pass a law making it illegal to charge for benefits advice maybe? I dunno, more red tape.
Congrats to the mods (and to Leon) for reining him in a bit this year.
I expect that like me you've had a number of adverse experiences. I'd run you through a few, but it's boring and i'm sure yours are every bit as exasperating and tedious as mine.
Hopefully my Googling is incorrect.
I think this needs careful legislation. The courts can’t fix this because of freedom of contract
The question of cutting government spending gets passed over but this is what governments will eventually have to do.
It's hard to tackle the numbers off sick with mental health issues without investment in that Cinderella of the NHS, mental health services. Often what the anxious and depressed need is a purpose in life, and getting back to work is a step towards that. Work gives a reason to get out of bed, social contact and income. Getting people back into work is a key part of therapy, but should be carrot more than stick.
No wonder we have a 2 year wait for CAMHS assessment when a quarter of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist posts in the country are vacant and unfillable.
When it doesn't work, just make sure there is a grace period where you can make a bank transfer afterwards. I've done that with a few estates when their machines didn't work and I left the car for a few days during a camping trip.
I go back to my assesment of the Conservative's fundamental failure, obvious from about 2012 onwards. Lacking the know how of public services to pivot from the selective salami slicing of austerity to meaningful, coherent public service reform, especially in the largest spending departments - which could have saved what c the less favoured parts of the public sphere have faced. What they did was half arsed and left to gentleman enthusiasts like IDS. (the same reductive failures hamstrung whatever chance there ever was of finding Brexit benefits)
Framed like this, ongoing austerity was a failure of imagination, not primarily a fiscal one. I hope Labour's reform attempts turn out to be more meaningful - that the Labour programme is dry as anything doesn't necessarily bode ill.
There is a lot of boring but consequential stuff to think through that should have been done in 2012.
There's a large open air car park in the centre of Cheltenham which has a clunky old-fashioned device into which you have to type your car registration. The letter Z does not work. There is no attendant and no obvious work around so if your reg has a Z in it you have no option but to leave. You have five minutes to do this and have been clocked on camera so if you don't get out in the alloted time you are done.
This is fairly close to the situation with the lady in the news. She has my full sympathy.
I would hope that a sensible judge would take that into account.
Nothing new about "Rip Off Britain" but I am not sure that more regulation is the answer.
There is also, according to rumour, a strange issue with signal but no reception at some car parks. But good signal in the areas around them….
A lot of parking authorities try to bully you into using their App, which is fine if they are user friendly and reliable, which they are generally not.
Would you be happier if Income Tax was lower but VAT say 25%? Or Income tax abolished but everybody's wealth taxed at 2% pa?
Four big drivers of the high benefit bill imo are:
1. Housing costs - claimant's get their rent costs largely covered. Reduce rents = reduce benefits.
2. Low pay - most UC claimants are working.
3. Poor mental health care - most disability claims are not mental health related.
4. Illegal drugs - recreational drugs need legalising, regulating, taxing.
I wouldn't try and exploit it to get benefits.
This was a major factor in the scandalous Post Office prosecutions. The contract terms for Subpostmasters were plainly unfair and unreasonable. Strange that none of the lawyers involved noticed this.
The alternative is prescriptive regulations targeted at one sector, which I personally hate, prescribing grace periods down to a minute.
On topic, a B+ at best from me. Written from what I sense to be a Conservative perspective, it almost admits had Sunak and Hunt somehow remained in power, they'd have faced the same challenges as they would have but we know they'd have done nothing about winter fuel allowance and we'd have likely had a summer of strikes on the rails and from the junior doctors (and possibly others).
Hunt's NI cuts salted the earth for the incoming Government - they were a deliberate politically motivated act.
As for Reeves and Starmer, they have done what you must never do in politics - taken good ideas and turned them into bad ones. The winter fuel allowance, as it was, was wholly unsustainable and being given to some who frankly didn't need it. That said, the messaging, targetting and cliff-edge nature of the new measures were all avoidable mistakes.
The damning figures showing many people (not all by any stretch) are no better off now than in 2008 explain so much. After decades of cheap food, cheap fuel, cheap money and endlessly rising asset prices, we may be entering a prolonged period of anaemic growth at best and stagflation at worst. We all want to be better off than our parents and for our children to be better off than us but that part of the capitalist "contract" hasn't been delivered.
This sense of going nowhere fast (or slowly if you follow productivity numbers) is pervasive and corrosive and explains the appeal of those who claim they have "the answers" whether it's slashing "the public sector" by 50% or net zero migration. I don't see how one or both works but if you are desperate and feel trapped any glimmer of light will be welcomed.
If you have or seem to have no answers, no one will support you. If you have answers, even if they are the wrong ones, you will attract supporters. That's populism.
But, there should be just one universal app. Downloading a plethora of apps is a pain. The government should invite tenders and contract it out over a four/five year period or some such.
Being right-wing doesn't mean you condone a wild-west or the absence of the rule of law; in fact, it's quite the opposite.
They don't benefit from financial advisers in the same way people avoiding tax do.
In my department we have rehab officers who help people with benefits and work to adjust to chronic sickness and disability. We do this because early support keeps people in work, and employers are often amenable or supportive to changes in work duties or patterns.
Once someone with chronic disease or disability is off work it is much harder to get them back into it. Similarly, early support for retired people and their carers often prevents a problem becoming a crisis.
It's a matter of targeting wisely and compassionately more than a matter of funding.
I’ve encountered management who simply refuse to contemplate a world where they have to invest in productivity - both machines and people. The cheap labour is their right, damn it!
Surely a Labour government could have sold the following -
1) Increase the number places for students to study medicine at X percent, per year, until we reach a target of 100%* of planned future capacity of the NHS.
2) Increase by a matching X percent, the number of training places within the NHS.
The aim would be to eliminate the use of agency staff, for medical duties in the NHS.
*institutions being what they are, there will be an overshoot. In 20 years time we will have a surplus of doctors and nurses. On the other hand, there will still be a world wide shortage of medical staff….
The system doesn’t look like it can be tweaked back into equilibrium. Labour are making some positive noises that they get it. They were elected on a Change mandate. I hope they go for it.
If they don’t, the door is open to Reform and who knows what.
(Unlike tax avoidance/evasion advisers and home tutors who play the school exams game for you. Apparently.)
"Stress", "anxiety", "depression".. these are workshy lazy shysters who can't be arsed, are gaming the system and are probably close to the bottle and their nearest fast food joint.
You can see it in their faces.
A car park like this puts people off from using it, which is a problem for the businesses close to it as they will have less custom if potential customers can't safely park nearby.
The biggest factor, and one that is lost in '14 years of conservatives', was and is covid and the war in Ukraine that has overwhelmed every government that was in power
It has ballooned borrowing by more than £400 billion and caused the huge destructive rise in inflation
The truth is no government can go into an election campaign promising the remedy because, we the electorate, would not vote them in
All parties were economical with the truth before the GE, when none of them should have ruled out increases in income tax, vat and NI as these are the main levers for generating tax income
A rise in basic tax towards 25% with a reduction in NI to compensate those working, an increase in the tax free allowance to cushion poorer workers, replace triple lock with annual rise of inflation plus 1%, reduce corporation tax to 20% but at tthe same time introduce a wealth tax would be my suggestions
It is interesting that there are indications this morning that Haigh awarded the train drivers all their demands without permission from Reeves or the treasury, and that as she was not acting as Starmer and Reeves considered collectively she had to go
Anyway, we are where we are and it does look as if the budget has seriously damaged growth prospects and that before the arrival of Trump and the chaos he will leave in his wake
We'd end up with more free car parks and council car parks, but not fewer car parks.
'Nigel Farage's Reform will back Anas Sarwar to be next First Minister'
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24760407.nigel-farages-reform-will-back-anas-sarwar-next-first-minister/
The processes in place don't appear much interested in sorting between the two.
Parking companies are self regulated and there are two regulators. The BPA and the IAS. Paid for by the parking companies who want your money. They’re not going to be in your favour,
Always worth an appeal to POPLA. Even if you lose it costs the parking companies around £30.00
It’s an industry that is ripe for proper regulation. However it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Oh and you’re right about it damaging businesses. I remember this case of over zealous parking company from MSE a few years back.
https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/15047352.company-vows-to-boycott-hotel-after-staff-fined-100-to-park-there/
You deserve compassion if you cannot park your Jaguar (rip) competently, but if you’re broken by depression you’re on your own.
Then you will get a government using primary legislation to get round all of it. And probably selling the whipped vote in the Commons to the developers…
And once a government starts using primary legislation to Get Things Done, there will be no stopping them.
“We build the trains on time. Also the migrant deportations.”….
Wonder how much instant planning permission for a new town (unstoppable by legal challenge) would be worth to the right people?
What went well: I think there is a fundamental honesty in this piece that is lacking in both sides' more partisan bleatings on our current issues.
Next steps: incorporate the relative willingness of the parties to court unpopularity by actually tackling the mess we're in. For all his flaws, Starmer cultivated the narrative that things are broken and need fixing. Sunak couldn't do this as
he'd be pointing definitively to the large hole in his own foot. This now means Labour has more space to say how bad things are, and can do more to put things right (whether he does or not remains to be seen).
Whatever I think of Boris Johnson, having had all the luck going in the 2010s (arguably), karma repaid him in spades in 2020 and afterward. There's an irony somewhere in all that.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but Sunak and the Treasury must have thought through the economic and fiscal consequences of "unlocking" all that pent up demand, releasing all the accumulated cash into the economy. Obviously, Russia's invasion of Ukraine was another factor - I think Sunak lost control of the public finances and the brief Truss/Kwarteng interregnum did us no favours either. In essence, it paralleled 1992 - once the Conservatives lost the public perception for sound economic management, they were toast.
Everything that happened from 2022-24 was analogous to the prisoner's long walk to the tumbril.
I have to go into town and do old-school things like posting a card, buying things with cash at a market, visiting the library, so I'm going to miss some of the early fun it looks like.
The worrying thing is overall upward trend for incapacity benefits is consistent since about 2012. Was about 5 per cent of the working age population then, now about 7 per cent, pretty much a straight line between the two.
Slightly higher for men, much higher for older age groups, and the increase is consistent across age groups.
And that the number of new people claiming hasn't risen particularly quickly - it's the number of people not coming off incapacity benefits which is the bigger issue.
What fundamentally disappointed me about Sunak and Hunt (especially Hunt) was their failure to acknowledge their prospects (inevitable defeat) and the freedom that gave them to do the right thing by the country; namely, to do some genuinely unpopular but genuinely necessary stuff. Planning reform, recalibration of taxes and spending, that sort of thing. Hand over a better inheritance to the next government. They'd still have lost the election, but kept their self-respect and maybe won history.
Instead, we got further NI cuts which didn't win them many votes, "funded" by spending cuts that didn't even qualify as fictional.
As for the bigger picture, we have had a few decades of favourable demographics and other windfalls. They're over, and as the party lights turn out, they seem to have mostly gone on house price inflation and tat. Whoever runs things from here isn't going to find it easy.
https://www.noom.com/
https://www.noom.com/about-us/
"In 2008, Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov founded Noom because they were dissatisfied with how the American healthcare system focused on sick care instead of health care."
Sorry.
They follow the same old tired, dishonest matra about everything being disastrously bad, exaggerating the black hole (as an example) and making stupid, unforced errors. They show themselves to be completely out of touch with reality when it comes to large sections of the economy and people's real lives and at the same time continue the indefensible practice of sucking up to the multinationals and the rich and powerful.
I said before the election that, although I would not vote for them, I didn't fear a Labour victory and at least they would be able to do the basic job competently. I mistook boring for competence and sadly I was wrong.