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I think the public may not be fans of Rachel Reeves – politicalbetting.com
I think the public may not be fans of Rachel Reeves – politicalbetting.com
Net approval of the government's managing of the cost of living has fallen to -69, lower than the -59 when the Conservatives left office last JulyWell: 12% (-6 vs 28 Jun-1 Jul 2024)Badly: 81% (+4)Net: -69 (-10)yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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We should not allow the Tories to get away from the grotesque mess they made.
But - and its a big but - Labour have shown themselves to lacking in ideas and now trapped by treasury orthodoxy which insists that the way to restart an economy on its knees is cut some more, to fix public services is to break them harder, the way to restore confidence is make everyone depressed.
This is stupid. You cannot cut your way to growth. We need to invest.
Labour won't get re-elected by pretending to be Reform. It doesn't convince the Refukkers and misses off their own support.
The only way for Labour to win is to dump Starmer and Reeves before the damage is irreparable.
Possibly in a combined system.
Our two great crises are housing and energy - they have collapsed living standards for so many.
We need to build swathes of houses - gut the derelict centres of dead towns and rebuild them. Anywhere that Travelling Turnip has done a video? Compulsory purchase, flatten, rebuild. Can't have the private sector build tiny "executive style" houses at daft prices, build housing association property, set a living rent, screw the rentier market for good.
And where you can't gut and rebuild we go for new towns.
Transport - road and rail connectivity to link all these places up
We don't generate enough power and we're lunatic enough to link the cost of wind energy to gas prices from places we don't buy from. Disconnect as Spain have done. SMR reactors, wind, solar and tidal which is built here. And the power interconnects to transmit the power.
Two major programs which invest to deliver both a return on the investment, and to drive economic growth by smashing the shackles which have chained our economy to the prison wall.
To go off topic.
No one watch the documentary Twitter: Breaking the Bird last night?
It fulfilled the basic rule of talking to the people that were there who were pretty straight talking, albeit I daresay with their own agendas. I’d say the Musk era is just a continuation of the general weirdness & chaos of the project rather than a break. Jack Dorsey (who didn’t agree to be interviewed) bears a lot of responsibility imo. He seems to have spent years in a tantric trance while everything went to shit.
https://x.com/MrsMThatcher/status/1906950777853104416/photo/1
SMR are essential for energy and we should be 5 years towards building them.
Ideally Manchester, Birmingham should be getting proper underground metro lines to add their expansion.
Some additional rail before the WCML grinds to a halt - both the WCML and ECML are at capacity.
Oh and a shed ton of housing.
Her errors are well documented but bear repeating - the WFA cut looked to many to be a miserly and unhelpful first step of a new Labour government; the months of doom and gloom helped contribute to a wider malaise; the stupid tax pledge and their unwillingness to stick a penny on income tax led to a budget that tied them into policy contortions and dented business confidence; the headroom gambled on a more benign economic outlook which was irresponsible when it was a coin toss at the time that a second Trump presidency was looming; and now she’s been forced into disability benefit changes which I suspect seemed popular on paper but when they bite will be considered unfair.
It is hard to think of a worse performance from a chancellor in year 1, whatever the inheritance (other than Kwasi, which doesn’t really need to be said). You can disagree with Osborne’s methods, but he was able to control the narrative for his cuts.
Possibly reopening the Leamside line too.
I’m not sure what the delays are with the supposed new arena in Gateshead to replace the Utilita.
Osborne wanted the cuts. They were policy, and politically allowed the Tories to hang the mess around Labour's neck.
Reeves doesn't want the cuts. They are orthodoxy and as such the mess being generated is being hung around Labour's neck.
As @Foxy pointed out, the Tories won't benefit from this. The only winner is Farage.
https://x.com/mazzucatom/status/1906824385446764802?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
At least the govt have recognised this with regards their funding for apprentices.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0029m2t
https://x.com/danroan/status/1906785356349153621
@danroan
Chelsea turn £90m loss into £128m profit after sale of women's team to their own parent company.
We seem to be nearing Kwasi Kwarteng's lows but at least both him and Truss were removed within weeks
I know today's date but the combined price increases across the board from today entirely wipe out the triple lock by some margin
Now for us we are fortunate as we can afford it, but a large number of both the working and retired will be struggling and are unlikely to improve their opinion of this government anytime soon.
And tariffs from tomorrow, goodness me we are living in an unpredictable and ever changing world with so many unknown outcomes
I understand Trump, Putin and Orban have attacked the French judicial system over Le Pen, and it seems we now have extremely powerful and dangerous world leaders fementing disarray and disruption the likes of which has not been seen since WW2
Anyway off for my annual check to see if my pacemaker is working - fingers crossed
https://www.friendsofyorkartgallery.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Liverpool-Docks-at-Night-by-J-Atkinson-Grimshaw.pdf
But in the short term, the country and the government are less rich than we have spent decades assuming. There are choices about how to distribute the resulting pain, but no honest chancellor would be popular now.
Hangovers, as I've said before, aren't meant to be fun.
Cost of living did for Biden and it will do for Starmer. Although has three years to turn it around.
As far as we can see - Biden just didn't get it at all during his tenure because the actual economic stats looked good.
But as the famous focus group response said: "that's your GDP, not mine."
Yes we need more growth, but Labour arent articulating what growth means to them. (Hint: “more money for public services” isn’t a vision).
Lord alone knows how Reeves would have managed that triple whammy.
There are still some bumpy issues ahead such as the workers rights bill which won’t be good for business or growth but if we can weather the next ten months things may just start to get better going into the last half of this parliament.
Oh and I almost forgot the Autumn 2022 "most impressive Conservative budget since records began"* according to Nigel Farage.
* My précis.
Government is brilliant at investing in crap - politically dictated projects that make no economic sense, from Concorde to HS2 to ...
On energy it should be encouraging, not preventing, the private sector to exploit our hydrocarbon reserves.
On transportation, it should be building the projects that will boost the economy the most, which are generally roads in and around London, rather than the dismal disaster of HS2.
On housing, the government should be facilitating private sector self-build.
It should be cutting business regulation and taxes, and if necessary increasing taxes like VAT which harm economic growth much less, as Mrs Thatcher did in her first term.
Etc etc.
They are better at implementing centre-right policies than the Conservatives, who are incompetent; the key thing for me is keeping a sensible government in office, and Reform would be a dangerous car crash.
Eck lives!
WIfey thought I was April fooling when I opened the bedroom shutters and said "blue sky with saltire in the east".
Covid - once in a century genuine crisis. A literal hospital pass to be fair
Ukraine - two crises. The military one? Can't see Starmer treating it differently. Energy? We were chained to Russian energy in part thanks to a PM who was bezzies with oligarchs
Cost of Living Crisis - Housing (Tories fault) and Energy (Tories fault)
Even this week the Tories are on the move in Parliament, standing up for the rentier class and against normal people.
My local power station, Little Barford CCGT, opened in 1996 and is essentially life-expired. (*). The most cost-effective thing to do would be to close the power station and build a new plant. The government want it to keep running, but apparently will not allow it to be rebuilt. So instead costly upgrades need to be done to an unreliable plant. The worst of both worlds.
This will increasingly become a problem if the government does not readily allow existing CCGT plants to be replaced.
JFDI.
(*) It's predecessors on the site worked for 40 and 30 years respectively.
The Scotch ones are the worst, they make the sheeple stubbornly vote Nat.
1) the Government didn't leave them alone to build it
2) the requirements were gold plated on top of diamond encrusted gold
3) in the case of Euston 3 different projects (HS2, fixing TfL's station, the tunnel to Euston) have all been put into the HS2 pot.
4) the economic model ignores all journeys that aren't to and from London because oh it was too complex
4b) it really didn't consider the impact of an empty WCML and ECML would have on capacity uses on the WCML / ECML and freight
On 1 we should have a permanently employed team working on HS2 Manchester, then HS2 Leeds. We should also be working on HS3 expanding from Birmingham to Bristol / Exeter / Swansea.
Unfortunately, Labour were not slammed by the media for that tactic, which helped encourage the Conservatives to do something similar.
Though I can see Casino voting for them.
Trump's lawyers are arguing that because they've dumped this guy in a Salvadoran prison, he can't file a habeas corpus petition, because he's no longer in American custody. They're arguing that once you get to sent to El Salvador, no court can order the govt to bring you back.
https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1906903088461656383
And don't start me on PPE fast lanes ..
My two biggies are Housing and Energy.
Housing? The private sector is fast at buying land and slow at building houses. And what it does build are the wrong types of homes sold at daft prices. We need to demolish and rebuild broken towns and with the greatest respect I don't see Taylor Wimpey going to shareholders like my mum asking her to invest in building affordable homes in Mansfield. It'll need to be government and local authorities setting development zones and then directing what types of homes to build for the LHA. At which point Taylor Wimpey etc can bid for the contract.
Energy? I agree that we should keep drilling oil and gas - its nonsensical to stop doing so and then import it. We also need to supercharge clean energy industry - don't settle for imported equipment we should be designing, building and exporting. Which needs a stable policy and government tax bungs to get started. We're all talking about SMRs but again that needs government to say they actually want them and to slash the timetable to actually build them quickly.
Transport? Can't all be London because then you don't have an economy. All of our competitors in Europe connect up towns and cities - we have to do the same.
Business? Needs to invest in skills and facilities. I have a much longer list of ideas, but the starting place should be Corporation Tax cuts only for companies who invest in skills and infrastructure. When we cut their taxes and ask for nothing in return we get nothing in return. Productivity is so low in this country because we have largely unskilled unmotivated workers left ignored by their employers.
Shadow Chancellor Osborne was very clear. He wanted to drive the bubble even harder, match every penny of Labour spending plans, and then give the extra tax receipts from the bigger bubble back as tax cuts. And regulation of the city which was woefully inadequate under Labour? He decried why it was so heavily regulated and wanted to cut red tape even more.
So which spending are you saying the Tories wouldn't have done, because they openly and repeatedly pledged to spend every single penny. As I'm sure you well know...
* That's not to say Reeves wasn't foolish not to reverse them on day one of the new Labour Government.
From memory and experience the route form Birmingham to Bristol needs vast improvement it’s slow and at capacity (albeit not helped by the short trains cross country have been lumbered with).
Chapeau.
"Unfortunately, Labour were not slammed by the media for that tactic, which helped encourage the Conservatives to do something similar."
.....It might not make an instant difference but it'll make people feel better about things
....and for those it doesn't it'll give them something else on which to concentate their ire
Clearly they can't say "carry on doing what we were doing". It needs to be something new. Tories used to be the party of business, surely some of them must know someone who still supports them who understands business?
Its this gaping political void and Reform are happily occupying it to draw crayon pictures on the walls.
The nation didn't get lucky by Johnson's late first lockdown, but he (and we) got lucky with the final Christmas non-lockdown.
Then she has now annoyed the left by cutting spending on welfare, overseas aid and the civil service
Global fossil fuel usage is still climbing.
A crime against future generations .
Complicity, yeah, if you are not doing what you reasonably can you are part of the problem.
10% council tax on unbuilt homes would bring more housing to market than any sad yet comic cry for growth and a pointing finger.
As for Labour. Shakes head. A hard stop on selling council houses would have been an easy win. WFA needed to be stopped. End of 2026 allowing time to get your house draught proofed would have less dumb.
I’m not surprised Casino is considering joining.
Or maybe they have been brilliant and have all gone over my head. It is difficult these days to tell the difference between reality and spoofs
We need to go further and faster on clean energy - it's the future of energy independence and will be a brilliant way for the UK to make money. But we can't just stop drilling the oil and gas still in our waters. With the best will in the world we still need the stuff - oil especially. If we stop digging our own we have to import it. How does that make any sense?
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/motability-car-scheme-abuse-benefits-claimants-3614822
So I need arguments. I’ve got these.
At one level, importing fossil fuels is a principled yet doomed stand against autarky.
On another, if it’s still in the ground it isn’t part of the catastrophe.
People will put up with painful government decisions, within reason, provided that those decisions fit in with an overall strategy that it has explained is necessary and ultimately beneficial; pain for gain. But you've got to set the vision and you've got to join the dots. I'm not seeing any of that.