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Cakeism is alive and well – politicalbetting.com
Cakeism is alive and well – politicalbetting.com
With the government releasing its strategic defence review, 49% of Britons say that defence spending should increaseHowever, only 29% of Britons say they would support raising taxes to pay for increased defence spending, with the same number saying so of public spending cuts
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Possibly it will improve things slightly.
But taxes will have to go up.
Future of troubled supplier in doubt as US private equity group says it cannot proceed with acquiring £4bn stake
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/03/thames-water-kkr-pulls-out-rescue-deal
There better not be a bailout.
But costly.
I have feeling this is going to be an off topic morning (if I have anything to do with it). I like the Shrodinger's Cat style provisional nature of Googlewhacks. Shrodingers Cat no longer exists once you get to look at it, and prove it does exist. A Googlewhack no longer exists once anyone mentions it online.
I'm interested in the concept of an Andywhack, which is the last person in the world to find out about something that everyone else already knows about already
I probably qualify as an Andywhack in many areas of popular music ... "Have you ever listened to (classic 1970s or 80s or 90s pop song)?". Probably not.
Well I once ate at a Wetherspoons near Durham railway station.
It would provide a salutary lesson for the rest of the industry - and might even end up bring a profitable deal for government.
Sometime you find quality in surprising places. Such as coffee in McDonalds.
I like to cook a roast too but it's at least 2 hours of graft in the kitchen, lots of elements and timing involved, with all the consequential washing-up - so I can understand if people don't always fancy it.
Politicians of every party - including new kids in the block Reform - have been making unfundable promises since the dawn of time.
They've got away with borrowing and selling assets for several decades, and are now facing crunch time.
Can the Govt put administrators in just because money is owed, without too much process - or does it need some sort of legal shenanigans first?
Starmer caused the problem he will have to resolve the problem.
The lenders offering "rescue plans" are doing so because there'll eventually be a bail out
If A serves up BS, who is responsible for the stomach ache when B swallows it ?
If you touched their pensions or cash benefits they'd scream blue murder.
The Lib Dem’s are the worst for it but they all do it.
{Must finish article of Blobism}
Right now, ministers are receiving a tidal wave of paper on how bad an idea letting Thames Water go bankrupt is. Domestic and international repercussions. Etc etc.
“The sensible, but tough decision, minister, is to bale them out.”
Well here is an idea Starmer, grow a pair and refuse to revert the WFP and change the 2 child cap
The WFP political damage has already been done and labour cannot change the narrative by reinstating it
The country needs a strong conviction politician, not one that bends and sways when he thinks he may be unpopular
Yes Starmer, no use being the son of a toolmaker if your tools snap and break at every turn
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/f1-2025-spanish-grand-prix-review/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f1-2025-spanish-grand-prix-review/id1786574257?i=1000710974809
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4y32Ihz6oKCx6jHXJGITiN
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/bcfe213b-55fb-408a-a823-dc6693ee9f78/episodes/74a2cf38-60e7-4d0f-b048-b66a5353cd97/undercutters---f1-podcast-f1-2025-spanish-grand-prix-review
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/06/f1-2025-spanish-grand-prix-review.html
They are there to represent us.
We elect councillors who increasingly proffer themselves for election under sense of obligation / guilt to their party of choice and end up stuck with little experience or understanding facing a completely impossible budget making horrendous cuts because the alternatives are even worse.
Of course there are many voters who think voting Reform and sending in DOGE will save a packet because all councils are wasting our money on the other people and their woke nonsense, aren't they?
Hence Reform pledging to scrap LTNs at their new councils only to find there are none, and to scrap DEI officers only to find there aren't any. What they will find is nightmare budget choices which will get worse every year regardless of what gets cut this year.
There is a shitton of waste, but its in the structure not the budget.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Profit is the reward for risk.
Conservative voters appear to be the most pragmatic about it, with high scores for both cuts to spending and increases in tax. They might appreciate that a very large chunk of public spending goes on them given their age profile.
Labour and Lib Dem voters are a bit deluded - they need to accept that they tend to occupy the highest incomes, so at least some of any tax rises need to come from them (though a fair chunk might come from wealth via increased council tax, for example, or from benefits).
Reform voters are the biggest proponents of cake-ism, though there is a glimmer of justification in that given working-age benefits and spending have been relatively hammered and tax thresholds etc have been frozen. They are much younger than Conservatives, on average.
The people running the company keep on working.
What happens is a high finance drama. Shareholders wiped out. Bond holder get nuked as well.
Relieved of debt, the ship rights it self. Like a sailing ship on it beam ends, when they cut the masts away.
The important thing is that, when the government steps in, they guarantee the suppliers bills. Otherwise companies in the supply chain go bust.
Lend money to Thames Water for this purpose, as the most senior form of debt. So when the previous debt is annihilated, the loan is protected.
Without nearly all of its previous debt Thames Water will be very profitable. It will pay back the handful of millions to protect the suppliers, easily. If managed sensibly, the government will make a profit on the loan.
I agree that politicians are partly to blame: but the media need to shoulder more of the blame. They are always looking for gotchas or simple soundbites. Perhaps that's because that is what the public's attention span can handle; or perhaps it is simply because it is easier for the media.
It's particularly galling as many politicians and parties agree on the problems; and their proposed solutions are not miles apart, but they need to appear different so they can attack their opponents' ideas. Also, because many of the simple lies told by populists fall apart under even moderate scrutiny. But the media does not give them that scrutiny, preferring the soundbites.
Enough already. Get this done.
He is PM
We should absolutely let it fail and bring in government appointed managers to ensure it continues to operate. And I would go much further. We've had decades of whining about PFI contracts. Tories create them and Labour complain, then Labour expand them and the Tories complain, then the Tories expand them etc etc.
Your PFI hospital with its daft contract. Renegotiate it. In the real world contracts get renegotiated. The PFI company can't repossess the hospital or the school and sell it to Burger King - it can only do the thing it was designed for. Which gives the state leverage over them.
The private sector has been - deliberately, as government policy - been allowed to milk the public purse for a long time. They can hardly complain when the milking is stopped.
Fundamentally, we can't afford to give the level of cash benefits out we are doing at the moment to the non-working, though.
Those planning to retire in future will need to work for longer, and make more provision for their retirement, and those not working will need to work.
Incapacity and disability benefit at £100 billion a year is totally unsustainable.
At some point, adults are responsible for making intelligent decisions, which is the theory behind democracy after all. It is unrealistic to expect the Great Unwashed to make correct decisions on technical economic issues. But knowing that you can't forever spend more than you earn should is not difficult or technical - the electorate just doesn't want to hear it.
If they don't understand these matters, they should at least defer to those who do, while holding them accountable for the results. And if the electorate keep electing those who continually avoid making choices that are hard in the short term but pay off in the long term, they have only themselves to blame.
(Yes, I know this might well be illegal. But it shouldn't be.)
Peak 7.14am train cancelled this morning (no reason given) and follow-up 7.44am train has 8 coaches, rather than 12, so is absurdly overcrowded and people can't get on.
Angry that things aren't the way they used to be and that they're not better off than they are.
You must remember the motto - "Expect the Unexpected".
Heavily overcrowded train and everyone pissed off. Playing two automatic announcements:
(1) "Abuse against our staff will not be tolerated"
(2) "You must have a ticket to travel on one of our trains or you will pay a penalty fare"
Revolutions have started for less. The passenger experience is entirely shit.
No explanation for the cancellation and an entirely insincere or pre-recorded "apology" if you're lucky. Which we are not.
Yes, but...
People can only make decisions based on information they have. And the media are terrible at presenting the in-depth information needed to make intelligent/rational decisions. Campaign groups (for an against) also muddy the waters.
And I include myself in that. I would like to think I am fairly knowledgeable in some areas; in others, I have only the vaguest of knowledge. *Everyone* is in that state. Some know more than others, particularly in narrow areas of expertise. No-one can have deep knowledge and understanding of everything to a depth where they can make intelligent decisions.
Decisions are also not made in isolation, and an 'intelligent' decision in one area might have deeply negative impacts in another area.
In addition, people may be making intelligent decisions for themselves, knowing that those decisions may be bad for the country if everyone made the same decisions. Is it intelligent to make yourself poorer, even if it may help the country? After all, you may well feel the money you have lost, when the advantage to the country from your loss is tiny, on an individual basis. And you may well feel that loss immediately, whilst the advantages will only be felt in a decade or more.
Interesting that people with degrees are up for a fight.
Sir Jon Cunliffe was on R4 this morning wibbling about "stronger regulation" and the need for "new legislation". Just long-grassery.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz70g4vgdnxo
Cut the Gordian knot and make an example of Thames.
It's going to cost the public a fortune to bail it out whatever happens; if we don't own it in return for that, then it's a message to the private sector that they can carry on treating us as fools.
Very much the end of times it would seem. For the second time in as many days, I find myself agreeing with a @BartholomewRoberts post.
There's nothing wrong with Toby Carvery - yes, the snobs don't get it. It's not The Ivy and doesn't pretend to be but I've never had a duff meal in my local (Snaresbrook).
Some may feel a Yorkshire Pudding for breakfast is an idea ahead of its time and I have some sympathy with that view and when you go "large" you never fill your plate with extraneous Yorkies. Indeed, I have a friend who took up learning physics to see how much they could pile on their plate and the best way of usuing gravity to their advantage.
You can also quickly tell those who've played Tetris in their youth.
Saturdays are the best day becasue they have roast lamb - a little bit of reconnaissance required to see when a new joint appears and then up you go.
The interesting moment we are at is because the post WWII social democrat consensus is no longer affordable, and in certain ways has become a monster, but no ideological alternative is around. Farage and Reform discovered this in the last month. They too are social democrats. Ignore what they say, watch what they do, and what they put in the 2029 manifesto.
The fact everyone might have been TUPEd across doesn't change that.
You can't really blame the electorate for falling for it.
That's almost as bad as it was in the 2010-2015 parliament, when interest rates were far far lower and there was a plan to eliminate the deficit.
Our current behaviour is of a country on the path to bankruptcy.
The thing about long-term choices is that, by the time the foolishness of bad choices becomes clear, the people who made those choices have largely moved on. Choir Invisible and all that.
Example one. The pay-as-you-goness of many pensions is now clearly not a good idea. It only took a century or so for that to become clear.
Example two. The fiscal model of the last four decades has left us in a bit of a pickle. But they key bits of it (austerity by taking a maintenance holiday, Brownian game-playing, selling off the family silver) were all very popular at the time. I reckon that a fair bit of Farage's appeal is his promise to somehow keep that party going.
That gap between cause and effect is a real bugger, and I don't know what we do about it.
They've had contingency plans in place for some time to deal with the financial collapse of the company.
The principal critic of Toby on the previous thread was in fact Northern man of the people @Cookie, with sympathetic noises from hard right Toby-refusenik @Leon, but PB folklore will retell this as a snobbish assailing of classic British fare by the centrist dads and Lib Dems.
No surprises in the polling in the thread header. We've known this for ages - it's much easier for politicians, especially those who want to get elected, to say what the public wants to hear and to promise them the earth rather than be honest with them about what's possible and what isn't.
As a portion of overall expenditure, defence spending isn't large but if you are going to raise it, which is fine in and of itself, you need to explain how to cover the increase.
We aren't dealing with 100 Warsaw Pact armoured divisions at peak operational stength two hours drive from the Rhine but the nature and reality of warfare has also changed so our thinking must change with it.
As for the basic premise, until and unless politicians of all stripes start offering some honesty, we will get nowhere slowly absent a technological game changer which generates the kind of economic growth (4-5% per annum) which would cover all this largesse.
The division (not armoured) remains, as it always has, between the tax and spending cutters on one side and the tax risers on the other though it's not really an either/or as much as a both/and.
That's before we even get to the substantive of reducing the deficit and borrowing by somewhere in the region of £100 billion to get the public finances under some kind of control. When the debate starts with every spending cut and every tax rise being considered the end of civilisation, that illustrates the paucity of the thinking and the cowardice of the politicians.
I used LNER yesterday.
Last time I looked at one of their menus there was nothing for a good Muslim to eat.
https://bsky.app/profile/nvondarza.bsky.social/post/3lqord7yxes23
For the Conservatives, it's pensioners. For Labour, it's public sector workers.
Sticker applied to a single car of a single unit aside, there is no GBR. Yet. I believe the phrase is "Nothing Has Changed". Because in practice nothing has. Same DfT meddling. Same lack of train sets. Same lack of money. Same operational managers.
They have unfortunately taken all the grills off the menu, apparently they couldn't make a profit at the price they charge and didn't think there was any room to increase it.
I've long enjoyed eating good food at good pubs, whether living down there in London for 6 or 7 years, or up here in Notts/Derbys. I'm not sure what the difference is, apart from a bit of pomposity or a 'famous' chef who likes looking in the mirror.
When I was in the Hardwick Inn on Saturday, having been walking on the Hardwick Estate Bastion Walk & landing on my butt because of a patch of mud that had no right to exist this far into a hot summer, a main course 'light bite' version (ie UK not US size) with a slice of one of their home made pies, a snack and a pint cost just around under £20. Their draught beers suitable for "half pint with a one hour meal" (i.e., ~4%) were Chatsworth Gold & Theakstons Best. They also had Taylors' Landlord and Old Peculiar on. For Ozzies, they also have kangaroo pee.
That's a nice food pub to me, but Google call it a Gastropub. Which is it? For me it's a good place to park because it saves me the 5 mile journey out and back through the Estate one way system, and the big hill is at the start of the walk not the end.
Also ideally situated for people wanting a break between M1J28 and M1J29, and has been in the same family foe 100 years or more. It's a beautifully placed site - just on the National Trust one way system exit, so 250k passing traffic a year are guaranteed, and for those in the know the food is better and less pricey pro-rate than the NT restaurant. You also get the free on foot entrance to the estate shops and so on, without breaching the inner pay perimeter.
Derbyshire has dozens of similar places, with their different styles, nearly everywhere.
https://hardwickinn.co.uk/index.html
Oh, you didn't mean the founder of the Free Speech Union which has a somewhat selective approach to the speech it believes should be free?
An example - education is a crumbling mess because of previous market reforms fragmenting the system to create an army of managers and contracts. We can restructure but that takes time and money. We need to bring trained teaching and support staff back into the profession but that means money on pay and conditions.
The costs will rise in the immediate term. But the benefit long term is sizeable. We actually educate our kids in schools which aren't falling down, with viable class sizes, with teaching resource fit for purpose. Attainment goes up. Emergency spending - lack of teachers, school building crumbling, kids missing, SEND emergency provision etc etc - goes down.
Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment.
Let it go bankrupt and burn the shareholders and boldholders.
Privatise the gains, privatise the losses.
Similarly I've met public sector workers who are baffled to hear some people are net financial contributors to the state. As 'everyone they know' tends to receive money from the government they might assume that applies to everyone they don't know as well.
There's likely a tipping point where there are so many people being a net recipient of pay, benefits and/or services from the state that it becomes the 'new normal' and its assumed that it can go on forever.
Let it go into administration and buy the assets at pennies on the pound if nobody else does after its gone into receivership.
The mitigation strategy is an evolved version of the "row of cucumber slices to extend the size of the small salad bowl in Pizza Hut" technique. This is now redundant due to unlimited salads.