How the general election would have looked under different voting systems – politicalbetting.com

Pulpstar said:

Roger said:

Malmesbury said:

Roger said:

Foxy said:

Roger said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.

Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds

Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts

A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.

Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/

Another gratuitous attack on the multi millionaire farming community. It's really got to stop. They'll be after the second home owners next.

You must be made aware of the poor plight of BTL landlords, who it seems Starmer expects to actually pay tax! Outrageous attack on the Private Sector.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/600000-landlords-death-tax-ticking-time-bomb/

I any other paper you'd think it was a spoof

What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.

What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.

I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.

Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?

MattW said:

Pulpstar said:

Malmesbury said:

Dopermean said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.

Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds

Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts

A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.

Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/

It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected?
DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)

I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.

The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.

The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.

I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.

The landowner is in this case National Trust. If the land has "irreplaceable artefacts" under the surface then a dig needs to be coordinated with them ASAP.

Reading the piece, it doesn't seem to me to be about digs; it's mainly about a farmer who wants to do what he wants with his land without regulating bodies interfering.

A tenant farmer has fought the case to Appeal Court level, and is imo arguing on dots and tittles. The claim afaics is that archaeological remains only count if they are on the surface, which seems illogical.

He previously received ~£200k of grants to maintain some of his fields. The piece is not clear whether it is the same fields.

I'd punt that the Telegraph are on it either to stir up farmers or stir up dust in their campaign against the NT.

Full piece:
https://archive.is/20241209175655/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/

MattW said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

MattW said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Good morning

I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings

I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously

It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it

She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me

Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?

Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csyGpWmlKM

She did get a 'toot' that woke her up and why she jumped out of her skin !!!!!!!!!!!

Great !!

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

HYUFD said:

So basically PR now benefits the Tories and Reform most as well as the Greens with the LDs little changed.

FPTP though massively benefits Labour now

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

MattW said:

MattW said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

MattW said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Good morning

I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings

I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously

It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it

She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me

Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?

Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csyGpWmlKM

She did get a 'toot' that woke her up and why she jumped out of her skin !!!!!!!!!!!

Great !!

My favourite is still the Hornster, that a Transport Charity chap put on his cycle as a PR stunt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9nonCqesLI

Pulpstar said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

The nation (As a whole) spends a bonkers proportion of it's income on (not particularly good or spacious) housing. Probably one reason why the economy has been so shit - if cash is being spent on property, and those receiving cash are spending that received cash on more property then it's not going into business capital, retail and so on...

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

eek said:

Malmesbury said:

Eabhal said:

viewcode said:

Nigelb said:

This is a very interesting read.
The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.

The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.

CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns

I had a quick look.

• It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
  
• Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
  

Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.

Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.

Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.

There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.

The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.

I think the point of adding trams when the site is in development is because if you don’t implement it now it will never be done in this country

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Eabhal said:

Malmesbury said:

Eabhal said:

viewcode said:

Nigelb said:

This is a very interesting read.
The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.

The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.

CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns

I had a quick look.

• It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
  
• Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
  

Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.

Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.

Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.

There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.

The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.

I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc

But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:

That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

MattW said:

Pulpstar said:

Roger said:

Malmesbury said:

Roger said:

Foxy said:

Roger said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.

Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds

Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts

A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.

Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/

Another gratuitous attack on the multi millionaire farming community. It's really got to stop. They'll be after the second home owners next.

You must be made aware of the poor plight of BTL landlords, who it seems Starmer expects to actually pay tax! Outrageous attack on the Private Sector.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/600000-landlords-death-tax-ticking-time-bomb/

I any other paper you'd think it was a spoof

What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.

What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.

I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.

Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?

Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?

The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.

Someone here will know more detail on this.

twistedfirestopper3 said:

.

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.

Leon said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

.

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.

“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

MattW said:

Serious question - how accurate is that $380 billion number? And how much has Ukraine actually received? Half? A third? Or less?

The vast majority of the US Military Aid, for example, aiui goes to the US military industrial complex and is counted at the full cost of the new equipment the US forces are getting as replacements, rather than the out of date cast-offs being sent to Ukraine.

Someone here will know more detail on this.

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

kinabalu said:

Leon said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

.

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

He's not finished, just going to grind on until the next GE. He's just not what we need to get out of this national funk we're in but to be fair, there's not a current politicial party or politician that I find inspiring anyway.

“Working his notice” is a brilliant description of Starmer. That is EXACTLY what he’s doing, and all he’s doing. He’s a placeholder

We're all doing that.

Pulpstar said:

Roger said:

Malmesbury said:

Roger said:

Foxy said:

Roger said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.

Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds

Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts

A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.

Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/

Another gratuitous attack on the multi millionaire farming community. It's really got to stop. They'll be after the second home owners next.

You must be made aware of the poor plight of BTL landlords, who it seems Starmer expects to actually pay tax! Outrageous attack on the Private Sector.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/600000-landlords-death-tax-ticking-time-bomb/

I any other paper you'd think it was a spoof

What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.

What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.

I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.

Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

Alphabet_Soup said:

Malmesbury said:

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

Scene : Malmesbury's Britain

Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?

Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.

Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.

viewcode said:

Leon said:

Just found this on a TwiX thread about bad trips

“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”

What objective proof do you have that PB exists?

(ducks)

Dura_Ace said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.

Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.

Most of the country are in a perpetual state of roiling fumingness with whoever is in government at the time; unable to come to terms with the nation's diminishing status and standard of living. The remainder are in a cynical, detached, possibly Pregabalin fuelled semi-ambulatory vegetative state.

PJH said:

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

I agree with your analysis. I disagree that WFA was an error - they just haven't sold why throwing money at wealthy pensioners can be better directed. Comms again.

And I think early unforced errors are inevitable when a party is out of power for 14 years. Is still make errors in my job, and I've been doing it for a lot longer than the government. What is different is that in my job there is a process to catch most of my errors before anyone else notices, but Labour hasn't worked it out fully yet.

DecrepiterJohnL said:

LostPassword said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Eabhal said:

Malmesbury said:

Eabhal said:

viewcode said:

Nigelb said:

This is a very interesting read.
The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.

The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.

CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns

I had a quick look.

• It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
  
• Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
  

Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.

Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.

Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.

There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.

The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.

I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc

But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:

That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)

London buses were always all red in the 80s and 90s. What Ken did was to introduce simpler, lower fares.

Blue buses and green ones and all sorts of other liveries immediately followed privatisation.

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.

Alphabet_Soup said:

Malmesbury said:

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

Scene : Malmesbury's Britain

Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?

Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.

Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.

MarqueeMark said:

Alphabet_Soup said:

Malmesbury said:

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

Scene : Malmesbury's Britain

Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?

Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.

Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.

If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.

So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.

Labour costs would still go up though.

And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.

Roger said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.

That's 'Rejoin' and he's keeping that up his sleeve (but this time with the full monty)

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Leon said:

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!

When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes

MattW said:

viewcode said:

Leon said:

Just found this on a TwiX thread about bad trips

“Best is from late Robert Anton Wilson the arch psychonaut explorer who had one trip so terrifying he ran out of his house, jumped on his motorcycle and rode out into the California Desert, kept going until he ran out of gas then slept in a ditch beneath the open skies, when he came to, he realised not only was he completely lost but he'd never owned, had access to or even ridden a motorbike.”

What objective proof do you have that PB exists?

(ducks)

What has it to do with ducks, philosophically?

On existence and observation, these are quite amusing and known as the Berkeley Limericks - apologies if you are familiar. We are talking early in the 20C. The first is from a Chaplain at Oxford University called Ronald Knox, who did various other things such as a Radio Broadcast in 1926 of a fake revolution in London, which gave Orson Welles his idea for the "War of the Worlds" radio hoax.

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God

If objects depend on our seeing
So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing,
Then my question is: Who
Is the one who sees you
And assures your persistence in being?

Dear Sir,
You reason most oddly.
To be's to be seen for the bod'ly.
But for spirits like me,
To be is to see.
Sincerely,
The one who is godly.

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

• There is a shortest possible unit of time
  
• Time travel is impossible.
  

Malmesbury said:

noneoftheabove said:

Foxy said:

Trump nominates Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News host who was engaged to his son, as Ambassador to Greece.

https://bsky.app/profile/annabower.bsky.social/post/3lcyfchnurs2i

I think a large part of the reason that US diplomacy is so cackhanded is because of treating ambassadorships as patronage appointments for the unqualified.

Does she realise its a country not a musical?

Greece isn’t a musical? When did this
change?

Dura_Ace said:

FeersumEnjineeya said:

Yeah, my impression so far is that Starmer is doing a reasonable job of playing the poor hand he has been dealt. He is a grinder, and I appreciate that after the showmanship of previous PMs, but I do wish he would be a bit braver and make more use of the large majority he has to play with. People like vision and action; even when things don't work out as planned, they appreciate the effort.

Do they? The British people don't fucking appreciate anything except tattoos and fucking Greggs as far as I can see.

rottenborough said:

"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.

The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."

AEP - Telegraph

Malmesbury said:

MarqueeMark said:

Alphabet_Soup said:

Malmesbury said:

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

Scene : Malmesbury's Britain

Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?

Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.

Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.

If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.

So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.

Labour costs would still go up though.

And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.

Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.

Including building houses!

rottenborough said:

"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.

The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."

AEP - Telegraph

Leon said:

Roger said:

mwadams said:

Roger said:

Malmesbury said:

Roger said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.

Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit:
"You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"

That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.

There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.

I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....

..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...

If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.

I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......

PB is always a lot less interesting after lunch. Lunch seems to be bad for the discourse.

PB can often be interesting but if you look at it as a newspaper-opinion pieces and up to date political news-when the opinion diverges too much from your own or indeed any civilised persons (white babies) and the politics is thin then it's just annoying.

I cannot remember the last time you contributed a comment that was in any way insightful, illuminating, educational, witty, unexpected, gracious, smart, amusing, elegant, perceptive, articulate, wry, sensitive, piercing, subtle, or intelligent

Your commentary is the equivalent of flatulence. You don’t comment, you fart. You come on here occasionally, and you fart, then you absent-mindedly walk away again

As such, I’m not sure you’re entitled to critique the wider PB discourse

Leon said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Leon said:

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!

When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes

That is stupendously dumb and clumsy

MarqueeMark said:

Malmesbury said:

MarqueeMark said:

Alphabet_Soup said:

Malmesbury said:

Sandpit said:

noneoftheabove said:

PJH said:

Malmesbury said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

Morris_Dancer said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?

Who said it was easy?

I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.

Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.

Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage?
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?

What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?

It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.

SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?

Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.

Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference

This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.

The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.

Build, build, build.

Then build some more!

It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.

Scene : Malmesbury's Britain

Husband: Disaster!
Wife: What?
Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box!
Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth?
Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?

Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.

Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.

If everybody with a bit of land was able to build up to say four houses on it, the developers would soon be finding their "land bank" was nothing very special.

So they'd soon be selling it off in parcels able to build, oh, say four houses. To people who would have no interest in sitting on it for decades.

Labour costs would still go up though.

And you might have to have some rules saying the four houses would have one with four bedrooms, one with only three, one with only two - and a one-bed starter home.

Since the cost of labour is tightly tied to the cost of housing (surprise!) a reduction in house prices would bring down the cost of a lot of things.

Including building houses!

You've clearly never worked with Devon builders.

Their costs - like time's arrow - travel in only one direction.

FeersumEnjineeya said:

rottenborough said:

"Putin’s regime is not yet at [economic collapse] but it would only take one more change in the Middle East to bring matters to a head. If the Saudis again decide to flood the world with cheap crude to recoup market share – as many predict – oil will fall below $40 and Russia will spin out of economic control.

The Ukraine war may end in Riyadh."

AEP - Telegraph

Looks like the Saudis will be cutting back production then.

Cookie said:

Leon said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Leon said:

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!

When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes

That is stupendously dumb and clumsy

Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.

Malmesbury said:

Cookie said:

Leon said:

Big_G_NorthWales said:

Leon said:

algarkirk said:

PJH said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

twistedfirestopper3 said:

BatteryCorrectHorse said:

I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.

We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.

I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.

Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.

I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.

My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.

My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.

I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.

As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.

Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.

Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.

Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).

I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).

'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.

It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.

What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!

When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes

That is stupendously dumb and clumsy

Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.

It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".