Stokes is again doing a lot of heavy lifting on the bowling front. This worries me for the Ashes.
There's some excitement about the possibility of a bowling attack that includes Wood, Archer and Stokes, but if they don't bowl out the opposition in the first 20 overs, who puts the overs in without breaking themselves?
I don't think you can risk playing Archer and Wood in the same team at the moment. I think you rotate them. Who are the other seamers, well then England have an issue.
Getting Bethall into the line-up helps as then you have Root and Bethall as right / left arm spinners to get in some extra overs.
To get motability as stated you need 12 points in mobility, meaning you need to demonstrate
1. Planning and following journeys. Can plan and follow the route of a journey unaided. 0 points. Needs prompting to be able to undertake any journey to avoid overwhelming psychological distress to the claimant. 4 points. Cannot plan the route of a journey. 8 points. Cannot follow the route of an unfamiliar journey without another person, assistance dog or orientation aid. 10 points. Cannot undertake any journey because it would cause overwhelming psychological distress to the claimant. 10 points. Cannot follow the route of a familiar journey without another person, an assistance dog or an orientation aid. 12 points.
2. Moving around. Can stand and then move more than 200 metres, either aided or unaided. 0 points. Can stand and then move more than 50 metres but no more than 200 metres, either aided or unaided. 4 points. Can stand and then move unaided more than 20 metres but no more than 50 metres. 8 points. Can stand and then move using an aid or appliance more than 20 metres but no more than 50 metres. 10 points. Can stand and then move more than 1 metre but no more than 20 metres, either aided or unaided. 12 points. Cannot, either aided or unaided, – stand; or move more than 1 metre. 12 points.
You can only score once from each section
Hmm, a very large proportion of drivers would qualify for Cannot follow the route of an unfamiliar journey without another person, assistance dog or orientation aid. Look at the number of people driving cars off piers because sat nav said so.
That is not true, you just need to be on PIP or suchlike benefit to be eligible and anyone can drive it , you don't need to ever drive it. Only downside is it reduces your benefit but everything is paid for re running it.
Anne Marie Morris formerly MP in Newton Abbott has joined Reform
The YouGov MRP currently has Newton Abbott as a Ref gain.
It was the MRP that persuaded our Heathener, who lives there, that it was a hot Labour prospect, despite anyone who knew anything about politics seeing it was an obvious potential LibDem gain, as indeed it proved to be
Anyone who takes an MRP prediction for an individual constituency without a bit of research is an idiot, particularly if one party is riding high like Reform now or Labour at the last GE. Then all sorts of LD targets that Labour were never going to win were being predicted as Lab.
To get motability as stated you need 12 points in mobility, meaning you need to demonstrate
1. Planning and following journeys. Can plan and follow the route of a journey unaided. 0 points. Needs prompting to be able to undertake any journey to avoid overwhelming psychological distress to the claimant. 4 points. Cannot plan the route of a journey. 8 points. Cannot follow the route of an unfamiliar journey without another person, assistance dog or orientation aid. 10 points. Cannot undertake any journey because it would cause overwhelming psychological distress to the claimant. 10 points. Cannot follow the route of a familiar journey without another person, an assistance dog or an orientation aid. 12 points.
2. Moving around. Can stand and then move more than 200 metres, either aided or unaided. 0 points. Can stand and then move more than 50 metres but no more than 200 metres, either aided or unaided. 4 points. Can stand and then move unaided more than 20 metres but no more than 50 metres. 8 points. Can stand and then move using an aid or appliance more than 20 metres but no more than 50 metres. 10 points. Can stand and then move more than 1 metre but no more than 20 metres, either aided or unaided. 12 points. Cannot, either aided or unaided, – stand; or move more than 1 metre. 12 points.
You can only score once from each section
Hmm, a very large proportion of drivers would qualify for Cannot follow the route of an unfamiliar journey without another person, assistance dog or orientation aid. Look at the number of people driving cars off piers because sat nav said so.
That is not true, you just need to be on PIP or suchlike benefit to be eligible and anyone can drive it , you don't need to ever drive it. Only downside is it reduces your benefit but everything is paid for re running it.
It wasn't a particularly serious post Malcolm. And I think you need to be on the higher rate of PIP, which is about 40% of claimants IIRC.
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
The chart posted the other day showed a large increase in claims for older people - still up 70+%
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
The chart posted the other day showed a large increase in claims for older people - still up 70+%
Compared to a 450% curve for the under 30's I am sure they will soon overtake in numbers within the decade
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
I googled PEBCAK and it came up as something to do with bondage and spanking !!
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
I googled PEBCAK and it came up as something to do with bondage and spanking !!
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
I googled PEBCAK and it came up as something to do with bondage and spanking !!
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
Sure: and within five years, there are more people in the 16 to 25 year old group that are claiming PIP than actually exist.
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
Sure: and within five years, there are more people in the 16 to 25 year old group that are claiming PIP than actually exist.
On a happier note I am supervising three Americans (from Texas) for the next few weeks. They asked me on Monday if this Friday is a day off in the UK.
As about forty countries around the world celebrate independence from the British Empire, having a day off on Friday would be a dangerous precedent.
Though if we manage to get rid of Northern Ireland at some point, I'd happily make an exception. It could be paid for out of the £15-20 billion in annual savings we'd make.
We must stand by our brothers in Orange, at least they want to stay British as the others did not
a) how do we know that the other countries did not want to remain British? Referenda weren't generally held, In India, some have speculated that 95% would have voted to remain in the Empire, but we'll never know. Same in Hong Kong. b) these are the same brothers in Orange that would have let Jeremy Corbyn be Prime Minister in 2017 unless they were bribed with more than a billion pounds by the hapless May government? c) they aren't our brothers anyway, generally no more than distantly related and rather embarrassingly primitive cousins to the lowland Scots d) they only want to remain British because of the £15-20 billion/year we send over there. If we stopped that, their Unionism would dry up pretty quickly.
The sooner they're gone, the better. They and the Irish deserve each other.
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
Sure: and within five years, there are more people in the 16 to 25 year old group that are claiming PIP than actually exist.
Perhaps we need to do an anti logans run?
The fact remains apparently in this country 26% classified as disabled and that is frankly ridiculous
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
For fourteen years Labour kept on saying austerity was a choice, yesterday was when those chickens came home to roost.
They seemed to forget that going into the 2010 election Alistair Darling was promising cuts more severe than Thatcher.
I maintain that the 2010 government should have taken a more Keynesian approach. Anyway not having followed the details I don't really understand why PIP was the focus of this welfare bill. Isn't the main issue a rise in people on out of work benefits?
5 in 6 people who receive PIP don't work. It is predominantly an out of work benefit despite nominally being classed as an in-work benefit. The issue is spurious claims and the government cuts didn't really address that issue and instead just cut it for everyone regardless of whether they actually should be getting it or not.
Again Labour already have a solution, they did it ruthlessly on 2001-2007 by targeting companies with bonuses on how many people they could kick off incapacity benefits which led to much tougher individual assessments and a tendency to refuse rather than accept and for appeals to also tend to rejection than acceptance. Labour successfully pushed over a million people off incapacity benefits and back into work with that approach and while there were some unfortunate edge cases, overall it was the single most successful policy that they had.
This is largely fiction - PIP has far more face-to-face assessments than DLA, the equivalent benefit at the time. In fact PIP assessments are generally considered far stricter than DLA, which had only 6% face-to-face assessments and PIP has far stricter qualifying rules on the backend to cover the descriptors, which are pretty vague. Getting DLA also automatically qualified you for the disability elements in Income Support without further assessments, the equivalent now would be ESA or one of the Limited Capability elements in Universal Credit. So if anything it was significantly easier to claim without assessment.
And if we really wanted to target the largest growth in PIP claims by numbers, then it would be physical disabilities and people over 45, rather than imagining that people with ADHD are suddenly claiming in huge numbers purely off the back of those. There is a wider data problem in that it doesn't seem possible to look at comorbidity, just lists of diagnoses involved in claims.
(edited to remove various incoherencies)
Except the biggest percentage rises in claimants are the under 45's
That doesn't necessarily contradict his point. If under 45s were 10% historically, and are 15% now, they would have had the biggest percentage jump, but still be less than a sixth of the total
Which is true but number of over 45's claiming is staying fairly stable.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming 2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
Over 45's are still increasing, and their numbers are well over a million. Overall growth contains both younger and older claimants. 16-25, currently at 60 000, which is where the media were claiming that the growth is down to ADHD in that group (!!!!!) is a drop in the ocean.
If the same rise happens next year for the 16 to 25 group that 60000 turns in 270000 and the year after becomes 1,215,000
Do you regularly buy the top?
Do you have reason to believe the trend of the last few years is not going to continue? I am going by the trend....you are going by what evidence exactly?
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
a) all our government debt is in our own currency, so a big foreign currency loan wouldn't help us b) unlike Greece or Ireland, we print our own currency - if we want more, we can get it easily enough. c) the IMF's resources are already strained, and it just doesn't have the resources to bail us out - we are much too large an economy for their available resources to make a difference d) it's morally wrong anyway - the IMF's funds are supposed to help developing countries in temporary capital market difficulties, not developed ones with vast capital markets but lazy and incompetent governments e) it wouldn't do us any good anyway - what we need is sensible economic policies, and we know roughly what they are, and can formulate and implement them ourselves. That they are directly opposed to what the government's instincts are isn't, and cannot be, the IMF's problem, and they would be very reluctant to become the fall guys for Reeves's and Starmer's economic illiteracy.
The point of bringing in the IMF is to be able to blame an outside actor for forcing the inevitable but highly unpopular corrective action.
If you have a government with insufficient stones to do that for themselves, then it is a benefit to the country, on balance.
That only works if the government can argue that bringing in the IMF was essential because they need a huge foreign currency loan, which as I have argued they can't.
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Borrowing and "Reform of public services"....hmmm...well we are doing the loads of former.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
I googled PEBCAK and it came up as something to do with bondage and spanking !!
Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard
So not Pert Excellent Buttocks, Chained And Kaned.
a) all our government debt is in our own currency, so a big foreign currency loan wouldn't help us b) unlike Greece or Ireland, we print our own currency - if we want more, we can get it easily enough. c) the IMF's resources are already strained, and it just doesn't have the resources to bail us out - we are much too large an economy for their available resources to make a difference d) it's morally wrong anyway - the IMF's funds are supposed to help developing countries in temporary capital market difficulties, not developed ones with vast capital markets but lazy and incompetent governments e) it wouldn't do us any good anyway - what we need is sensible economic policies, and we know roughly what they are, and can formulate and implement them ourselves. That they are directly opposed to what the government's instincts are isn't, and cannot be, the IMF's problem, and they would be very reluctant to become the fall guys for Reeves's and Starmer's economic illiteracy.
The point of bringing in the IMF is to be able to blame an outside actor for forcing the inevitable but highly unpopular corrective action.
If you have a government with insufficient stones to do that for themselves, then it is a benefit to the country, on balance.
That only works if the government can argue that bringing in the IMF was essential because they need a huge foreign currency loan, which as I have argued they can't.
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
And one of the lessons of this fiasco is that the whole damn country is still at the "cut spending, raise taxes, but do them in a way that doesn't hurt me" stage. We all (sort of) know what needs to be done, but I don't think the political rhetoric to persuade us to thank a government that does it exists. So we blame the politicians for not providing leadership that we are willing to deign to follow.
If you disagree, if you think there is a form of words that works, then excellent. The role of national saviour is yours.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
Look, the lady worked in customer services at a bank, so she should be used to dealing with idiots.
Dealing with idiots doesnt perhaps equip you for dealing with labour mp's? A group of people that the acronym PEBCAK was invented for
I googled PEBCAK and it came up as something to do with bondage and spanking !!
Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard
So not Pert Excellent Buttocks, Chained And Kaned.
On a happier note I am supervising three Americans (from Texas) for the next few weeks. They asked me on Monday if this Friday is a day off in the UK.
As about forty countries around the world celebrate independence from the British Empire, having a day off on Friday would be a dangerous precedent.
Though if we manage to get rid of Northern Ireland at some point, I'd happily make an exception. It could be paid for out of the £15-20 billion in annual savings we'd make.
We must stand by our brothers in Orange, at least they want to stay British as the others did not
a) how do we know that the other countries did not want to remain British? Referenda weren't generally held, In India, some have speculated that 95% would have voted to remain in the Empire, but we'll never know. Same in Hong Kong. b) these are the same brothers in Orange that would have let Jeremy Corbyn be Prime Minister in 2017 unless they were bribed with more than a billion pounds by the hapless May government? c) they aren't our brothers anyway, generally no more than distantly related and rather embarrassingly primitive cousins to the lowland Scots d) they only want to remain British because of the £15-20 billion/year we send over there. If we stopped that, their Unionism would dry up pretty quickly.
The sooner they're gone, the better. They and the Irish deserve each other.
a) Mostly as pro independence parties won elections in the former colonies. b) The DUP were never going to vote with pro SF Corbyn, at most they might have abstained so just got funds from May to avoid that c) They are Protestant British patriots, indeed often more loving of King and country and flag than left liberals in our big cities d) They have been pro British since the Battle of the Boyne and deserve the support of all true Tories and rightwingers, indeed Farage is also close to the DUP and TUV
Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17m The gilt move - especially at the long end - is big and bad. No sugar coating it. That said, the thing about the Truss debacle is that we saw these sort of moves day after day. Too early to say if this is a wobble or a bigger problem.
Worth noting: the gilt move really kicked off on speculation that Reeves could be replaced. ‘Reeves being replaced’ in this case meaning ‘a loosening of the fiscal rules’.
So there you have the first problem. Cut spending - PLP won’t wear it. Increase borrowing - the gilt market pushes back. You’re left with, raise taxes - break a manifesto pledge. Option 3 likely the least painful.
Depends on which taxes are raised. IIRC Starmer and Reeves have always said that they wouldn't raise taxes of 'working people"! Hence, en passant, the inheritance tax on rural landlords. But what about people who don't work? As well the rural landlords the are other landlords, investors, speculators on the Stock Exchange and Metal (etc) Exchanges. Inheritance tax might be a goer, too, although that doesn't bring in money quickly enough.
They will freeze tax allowances, freeze the WFA threshold, and maybe row back the annual cash ISA limit
If Reeves is still in post then the assumption is on Cash Isas she will announce a cut to 5k a year limit in the Mansion House speech in 2 weeks time. Freezing personal allowances almost certain and a big rise in fuel duty i think is likely
I think the ISA policy is broadly OK, but it’s another one that’s going to get people grumpy. Particularly pensioners who use the allowance to build more “safe” savings pots.
As a pensioner, we have more than enough help from the Government. If we have to pay some tax on our savings to help others, I don’t have a problem.
Equities will still have a £20k allowance so it's just useless cash ISAs that get gutted so pushing more money into equity markets will be the end result which is a net positive. Should have been done years ago.
Depends which equity markets. Doesn't help London much if people use world or US trackers.
Knowledgeable investors will be able to find a safe investment for their stocks ISA that more or less replicates what they would have got from a cash ISA. It will be people nervous about going near the stock market who will lose out.
To me it makes no sense to tax (including NI) income from working more highly than income from anything else. Why disincentivise work?
To a certain extent you tax the things they you can tax. Most of the normal people in work have no option but to work to pay the bills.
People who have spare capital around for investing have more options for what to do with it, and will thereby be able to avoid higher rates of tax.
This is why taxation of land has so much to recommend it.
Where's HYUFD? Your taxing FARMERS!!!
Yes they are, plus business owners and soon I expect those with expensive properties and lots of shares will be hammered with a wealth tax too to fund Labour's newfound commitment for further expansion of the welfare state and public sector
Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17m The gilt move - especially at the long end - is big and bad. No sugar coating it. That said, the thing about the Truss debacle is that we saw these sort of moves day after day. Too early to say if this is a wobble or a bigger problem.
Worth noting: the gilt move really kicked off on speculation that Reeves could be replaced. ‘Reeves being replaced’ in this case meaning ‘a loosening of the fiscal rules’.
So there you have the first problem. Cut spending - PLP won’t wear it. Increase borrowing - the gilt market pushes back. You’re left with, raise taxes - break a manifesto pledge. Option 3 likely the least painful.
Depends on which taxes are raised. IIRC Starmer and Reeves have always said that they wouldn't raise taxes of 'working people"! Hence, en passant, the inheritance tax on rural landlords. But what about people who don't work? As well the rural landlords the are other landlords, investors, speculators on the Stock Exchange and Metal (etc) Exchanges. Inheritance tax might be a goer, too, although that doesn't bring in money quickly enough.
They will freeze tax allowances, freeze the WFA threshold, and maybe row back the annual cash ISA limit
If Reeves is still in post then the assumption is on Cash Isas she will announce a cut to 5k a year limit in the Mansion House speech in 2 weeks time. Freezing personal allowances almost certain and a big rise in fuel duty i think is likely
I think the ISA policy is broadly OK, but it’s another one that’s going to get people grumpy. Particularly pensioners who use the allowance to build more “safe” savings pots.
As a pensioner, we have more than enough help from the Government. If we have to pay some tax on our savings to help others, I don’t have a problem.
Equities will still have a £20k allowance so it's just useless cash ISAs that get gutted so pushing more money into equity markets will be the end result which is a net positive. Should have been done years ago.
Depends which equity markets. Doesn't help London much if people use world or US trackers.
Knowledgeable investors will be able to find a safe investment for their stocks ISA that more or less replicates what they would have got from a cash ISA. It will be people nervous about going near the stock market who will lose out.
Yes, you can put it in something like a money market account, for example, and pay the charges associated with it.
Different people at different times of their lives have different investment priorities.
I don’t see why holding cash is a bad thing.
People should have a cash buffer for a rainy day, 6-12 months bills as a minimum, and the older you are the less risk you want to take with money.
You can use short term money market funds, fee 0.1% and you get circa 5% at present
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
She was never a serious individual. She is a lightweight politician who, like many of the hard of thinking on the Labour benches, assume that they are the good guys and that all they have to do is not be the Tories everything will fall naturally into place. It comes as a surprise that government is hard.
Despite the criticism she's had for her lack of economic nous, CoE is essentially a political role. You have a treasury to do the economics, but you need to be the public face of it. But she's arguably even worse at that than she is at underatanding the economics. You need to inspire some confidence. And bluntly, seeing the CoE crying doesn't inspire confidence.
She is, by a country mile, the worst chancellor of my lifetime.* Could you imagine Hunt, Sunak, Javid, Darling, Osborne or Brown screwing up quite this badly?
* Yes of course I include Kwarteng in that list. Even he is a titan by comparison.
Microsoft is cutting 9,000 jobs as executives order staff to delegate more work to artificial intelligence (AI).
The $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion) technology giant will shed 4pc of its workforce, it confirmed on Wednesday, with redundancies hitting divisions including its Xbox arm and King, its mobile games studios.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
Norway and Switzerland both watching closely, as both intend to try and top the group to avoid the likelihood of having to play Spain first in the KOs.
Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17m The gilt move - especially at the long end - is big and bad. No sugar coating it. That said, the thing about the Truss debacle is that we saw these sort of moves day after day. Too early to say if this is a wobble or a bigger problem.
Worth noting: the gilt move really kicked off on speculation that Reeves could be replaced. ‘Reeves being replaced’ in this case meaning ‘a loosening of the fiscal rules’.
So there you have the first problem. Cut spending - PLP won’t wear it. Increase borrowing - the gilt market pushes back. You’re left with, raise taxes - break a manifesto pledge. Option 3 likely the least painful.
Depends on which taxes are raised. IIRC Starmer and Reeves have always said that they wouldn't raise taxes of 'working people"! Hence, en passant, the inheritance tax on rural landlords. But what about people who don't work? As well the rural landlords the are other landlords, investors, speculators on the Stock Exchange and Metal (etc) Exchanges. Inheritance tax might be a goer, too, although that doesn't bring in money quickly enough.
They will freeze tax allowances, freeze the WFA threshold, and maybe row back the annual cash ISA limit
If Reeves is still in post then the assumption is on Cash Isas she will announce a cut to 5k a year limit in the Mansion House speech in 2 weeks time. Freezing personal allowances almost certain and a big rise in fuel duty i think is likely
I think the ISA policy is broadly OK, but it’s another one that’s going to get people grumpy. Particularly pensioners who use the allowance to build more “safe” savings pots.
As a pensioner, we have more than enough help from the Government. If we have to pay some tax on our savings to help others, I don’t have a problem.
Equities will still have a £20k allowance so it's just useless cash ISAs that get gutted so pushing more money into equity markets will be the end result which is a net positive. Should have been done years ago.
Depends which equity markets. Doesn't help London much if people use world or US trackers.
Knowledgeable investors will be able to find a safe investment for their stocks ISA that more or less replicates what they would have got from a cash ISA. It will be people nervous about going near the stock market who will lose out.
To me it makes no sense to tax (including NI) income from working more highly than income from anything else. Why disincentivise work?
To a certain extent you tax the things they you can tax. Most of the normal people in work have no option but to work to pay the bills.
People who have spare capital around for investing have more options for what to do with it, and will thereby be able to avoid higher rates of tax.
This is why taxation of land has so much to recommend it.
Where's HYUFD? Your taxing FARMERS!!!
Yes they are, plus business owners and soon I expect those with expensive properties and lots of shares will be hammered with a wealth tax too
I’m sure it will be as effective as all other wealth taxes.
Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 17m The gilt move - especially at the long end - is big and bad. No sugar coating it. That said, the thing about the Truss debacle is that we saw these sort of moves day after day. Too early to say if this is a wobble or a bigger problem.
Worth noting: the gilt move really kicked off on speculation that Reeves could be replaced. ‘Reeves being replaced’ in this case meaning ‘a loosening of the fiscal rules’.
So there you have the first problem. Cut spending - PLP won’t wear it. Increase borrowing - the gilt market pushes back. You’re left with, raise taxes - break a manifesto pledge. Option 3 likely the least painful.
Depends on which taxes are raised. IIRC Starmer and Reeves have always said that they wouldn't raise taxes of 'working people"! Hence, en passant, the inheritance tax on rural landlords. But what about people who don't work? As well the rural landlords the are other landlords, investors, speculators on the Stock Exchange and Metal (etc) Exchanges. Inheritance tax might be a goer, too, although that doesn't bring in money quickly enough.
They will freeze tax allowances, freeze the WFA threshold, and maybe row back the annual cash ISA limit
If Reeves is still in post then the assumption is on Cash Isas she will announce a cut to 5k a year limit in the Mansion House speech in 2 weeks time. Freezing personal allowances almost certain and a big rise in fuel duty i think is likely
I think the ISA policy is broadly OK, but it’s another one that’s going to get people grumpy. Particularly pensioners who use the allowance to build more “safe” income pots.
Im not a fan of it as I think encouraging investment into shitty equity funds is pointless. But as I can't have 5k a year to save right now it's not a drama for me. If banks take savings interest at source you can probably find deals that get around the lost 20%, it's not like savings produce much income with our flaccid interest rates anyway. Easiest sokution would be raise the interest limit before tax kicks in to a few thousand and scrap isas altogether
You can easily replicate the risk and return characteristics of a cash ISA within a stocks and shares ISA: short dated gilts, money market funds made up of said gilts plus other short dated debt...
For some values of ‘easily’.
Fair. I am now imagining explaining to my parents in law how Vanguard's short term £ MM fund held through XYZ's online investment platform is "just like" the cash ISA they were going to open at the PoOst Office down the road.
Trading 212 (and others) will do it all automatically for you. Outside of occasional speculative punts with my ISA I pound cost average into a worldwide tracker (daily) and keep the rest of the yearly allowance effectively in cash which gradually depletes during the year on said averaging. Looks like it's spread amongst 6 bank accounts and 8 money market funds none of which I have had to think about, I just ticked a button. I don't see how it's any more complicated than the Post Office... probably simpler if anything as latter would require a bunch of form filling.
Why are you dripfeeding from cash into the markets if the money's already in the wrapper ?
a) all our government debt is in our own currency, so a big foreign currency loan wouldn't help us b) unlike Greece or Ireland, we print our own currency - if we want more, we can get it easily enough. c) the IMF's resources are already strained, and it just doesn't have the resources to bail us out - we are much too large an economy for their available resources to make a difference d) it's morally wrong anyway - the IMF's funds are supposed to help developing countries in temporary capital market difficulties, not developed ones with vast capital markets but lazy and incompetent governments e) it wouldn't do us any good anyway - what we need is sensible economic policies, and we know roughly what they are, and can formulate and implement them ourselves. That they are directly opposed to what the government's instincts are isn't, and cannot be, the IMF's problem, and they would be very reluctant to become the fall guys for Reeves's and Starmer's economic illiteracy.
The point of bringing in the IMF is to be able to blame an outside actor for forcing the inevitable but highly unpopular corrective action.
If you have a government with insufficient stones to do that for themselves, then it is a benefit to the country, on balance.
That only works if the government can argue that bringing in the IMF was essential because they need a huge foreign currency loan, which as I have argued they can't.
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
Historically (right up until the mid 90s), the UK did borrow in foreign currencies from time to time, because investors demanded a premium for sterling denominated debt. The practice rather died up under the Blair government, and hasn't been revived.
I don't know if there's any residual foreign currency debt remaining - but if there is it'll be 30 year stuff that it's in very final years.
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Best,
Kirstie
Oh lord, another improvement. We're doomed.
A colleague of mine’s favourite saying was “Don’t improve a working system. You might improve it worse.”
The only thing I would quibble about there is the word "might". In my experience "improvements" invariably reduce functionality to give you stuff you don't want.
There is a German word 'Verschlimbesserung' meaning 'an improvement which makes things worse'. Applies to so much. When, for example, I can't switch the lights on in my kitchen because I don't have a password...
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
There were a ton of unfunded spending commitments. That's a fact. Whether it benefits from being termed "£22b black hole" and to what extent incoming Labour genuinely didn't know about it, I don't know.
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
It's clearly summer - just returned from my constitutional, and I'm covered in crawling flies of some sort.
It's time for a shar.
Bizarrely, I have just come across a house where the owner has occupied as much again as his back garden of one of our local green spaces as an extension. It's not just a summer sitting area; he's put a fence round it with a new back gate and a stone pathway. I've seen that in London, and major turf wars over 3ft nicked, but up here we are normally more restrained.
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
Chris Bryant being a nasty shit, shocked I tell you, shocked....for a man of god, less of turn the other cheek, more stick the boot in at every opportunity.
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
I've seen the way she speaks in parliament. This is not out of character. She's still basically a student politician my-lot-good-your-lot-bad.
She has recently brought on board an entrepreneur to try and undertake a review of how to help business. The entrepreneur seemed to be cut from a similar cloth when interviewed by Jimmy's Jobs of the Future.
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
I've seen the way she speaks in parliament. This is not out of character. She's still basically a student politician my-lot-good-your-lot-bad.
I wouldn't call that particular example as student politician behaviour, more the standard kind of partisan laziness when someone thinks they have found a good attack line and don't look into the details as a result. And 'my lot good your lot bad' is pretty standard across all age groups to of course.
With that being said I do think the student politician line still generally works as an attack, to indicate a lack of nuance and growth as a politician. Not that you always need to compromise when a senior politician, or that performative utterances are not a thing either, but just a lack of recognition of when to dial it back.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
Yes, I admit to being surprised they have not managed to get more mileage out of it as a result. It suggests either they've really messed up, people are a lot more impatient now, or the Tories were less unpopular years into office than people think, or some combination of all three.
1) The misogyny in British politics is appalling. They have attacked Reeves from day 1 as a woman - how dare she be appointed Chancellor! I have little doubt that politics at that level can be an emotional roller-coaster and some people are emotional beings.
I cried in a senior leadership meeting because the situation was that fraught. I can imagine me crying in a situation like that, or when Theresa May quit. As a bloke I get sympathy, but women get none. "too emotional" - how many times does that get added as a label to a colleague just because they are a woman?
That being said
2) Reeves is absolutely done. If she has something upsetting going on in her personal life then my sympathies - don't get her sat in the spotlight blubbing. A failing of the management team letting her sit there. If that's just cover then its my sexist patronising guff.
Problem is that she is Chancellor of the Exchequer and needs to be robust enough to face down critics and the markets and opposition idiots. Crying doesn't work. And she can't recover - even if she goes on in the role she will always be the chancellor reduced to tears as her boss fails to defend her position.
It's clearly summer - just returned from my constitutional, and I'm covered in crawling flies of some sort.
It's time for a shar.
Bizarrely, I have just come across a house where the owner has occupied as much again as his back garden of one of our local green spaces as an extension. It's not just a summer sitting area; he's put a fence round it with a new back gate and a stone pathway. I've seen that in London, and major turf wars over 3ft nicked, but up here we are normally more restrained.
a) all our government debt is in our own currency, so a big foreign currency loan wouldn't help us b) unlike Greece or Ireland, we print our own currency - if we want more, we can get it easily enough. c) the IMF's resources are already strained, and it just doesn't have the resources to bail us out - we are much too large an economy for their available resources to make a difference d) it's morally wrong anyway - the IMF's funds are supposed to help developing countries in temporary capital market difficulties, not developed ones with vast capital markets but lazy and incompetent governments e) it wouldn't do us any good anyway - what we need is sensible economic policies, and we know roughly what they are, and can formulate and implement them ourselves. That they are directly opposed to what the government's instincts are isn't, and cannot be, the IMF's problem, and they would be very reluctant to become the fall guys for Reeves's and Starmer's economic illiteracy.
The point of bringing in the IMF is to be able to blame an outside actor for forcing the inevitable but highly unpopular corrective action.
If you have a government with insufficient stones to do that for themselves, then it is a benefit to the country, on balance.
That only works if the government can argue that bringing in the IMF was essential because they need a huge foreign currency loan, which as I have argued they can't.
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
And one of the lessons of this fiasco is that the whole damn country is still at the "cut spending, raise taxes, but do them in a way that doesn't hurt me" stage. We all (sort of) know what needs to be done, but I don't think the political rhetoric to persuade us to thank a government that does it exists. So we blame the politicians for not providing leadership that we are willing to deign to follow.
If you disagree, if you think there is a form of words that works, then excellent. The role of national saviour is yours.
Yes, this is a bad episode but I do find all the "we need a vision and a narrative and a sense of where we're going bla bla" to be meaningless mantra speak. We don't need that at all. We need good policies to make the country a little bit better than it would be without them. And we need to align expectations with what is reasonably achievable.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
There were a ton of unfunded spending commitments. That's a fact. Whether it benefits from being termed "£22b black hole" and to what extent incoming Labour genuinely didn't know about it, I don't know.
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
currently Labour are racking up a £22bn black hole about every 6 weeks. And its getting worse
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
I think we are throwing the tougher immigration talk out the window. Promises made, promises....
UK visa revamp allows lower-skilled (non-graduate) office workers to come to Britain
Debt collectors, mortgage administrators and HR officers will still be able to come and work in the UK on skilled-worker visas after changes to the immigration rules that have left employers free to recruit overseas for a wide range of lower-skilled office jobs.
I have sympathy for a warehouse job turning down a graduate. We have a technician post that has had more people in the role that I've had hot dinners. Too often we go for graduates 'as the best candidate' and are horrified that (a) they are bored in the role and (b) find a better job in the first 6-9 months. I'd imagine Aldi were thinking similar.
Look at what/where she studied
“She has a degree in accounting and finance from the University of Salford and a masters in management from Manchester Metropolitan University”
Iffy book keeping roles at mediocre universities. People like her, and those skills, are first in the firing line, now. I doubt she will ever get a nice white collar job as she once hoped
This will soon apply to tens of millions of jobs and degrees. She’s saddled herself with all that student debt for nothing. Most universities are doomed
I feel very sorry for her and her generation. The best advice any parent can give an 18 year old child, now, is Give up on uni and get a trade, or, if you are really cerebral: go to a truly good university, a redbrick or better, and study what you love
At the very least you will enjoy your university years
And if more people study for a trade wages will go down for plumbers and electricians in turn as there will be less demand for their skills as more supply
The demand for builders, plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc is off the scale and £450 per day is not unusual
I doubt we will have enough for decades to meet the demand, and I would encourage all young people to get a trade, start a business, and earn lots without having student debt round their neck
University is not the pathway to success you seem to think it is
Given the time it takes to get, if I had it to do again, I would have done a CORGI and then an electricians qual - *while at uni*
A mate of mine shunned Uni and trained in refrigeration. Became a refrigeration engineer and has had a very good career. He also reckons not enough people are joining the profession, which helps his employability at the moment.
A relative works on large CCGT projects. He is earning rather well, as few youngsters are choosing to train in the old and un-green technology, meaning there is a rather large skills shortage.
People were nudged into taking degrees and away from these vocational courses.
I’m afraid govts from Blair on have really let down the young over this.
People like that lady in the BBC article who was rejected for a job she was overqualified for at Aldi are going to learn a hard life lesson. Hopefully they are young enough to be able to adapt.
Even before Blair, the Polytechnics were re-badged as Universities under Major.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
Which is the makings of a problem, as anyone who thinks there are alternatives who could both get the seats to form a government and in addition govern competently and seriously is making a substantial error of judgment. The only conceivable options thus far are, obviously, the Tories and Reform. Neither qualify.
a) all our government debt is in our own currency, so a big foreign currency loan wouldn't help us b) unlike Greece or Ireland, we print our own currency - if we want more, we can get it easily enough. c) the IMF's resources are already strained, and it just doesn't have the resources to bail us out - we are much too large an economy for their available resources to make a difference d) it's morally wrong anyway - the IMF's funds are supposed to help developing countries in temporary capital market difficulties, not developed ones with vast capital markets but lazy and incompetent governments e) it wouldn't do us any good anyway - what we need is sensible economic policies, and we know roughly what they are, and can formulate and implement them ourselves. That they are directly opposed to what the government's instincts are isn't, and cannot be, the IMF's problem, and they would be very reluctant to become the fall guys for Reeves's and Starmer's economic illiteracy.
The point of bringing in the IMF is to be able to blame an outside actor for forcing the inevitable but highly unpopular corrective action.
If you have a government with insufficient stones to do that for themselves, then it is a benefit to the country, on balance.
That only works if the government can argue that bringing in the IMF was essential because they need a huge foreign currency loan, which as I have argued they can't.
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
And one of the lessons of this fiasco is that the whole damn country is still at the "cut spending, raise taxes, but do them in a way that doesn't hurt me" stage. We all (sort of) know what needs to be done, but I don't think the political rhetoric to persuade us to thank a government that does it exists. So we blame the politicians for not providing leadership that we are willing to deign to follow.
If you disagree, if you think there is a form of words that works, then excellent. The role of national saviour is yours.
Yes, we are a big part of the problem. Top drawer political leaders can make the public realise that without losing too much support, but they are very rare indeed.
One of my political philosophies is assume politicians will take the easiest option, and it rarely lets me down - even when they try not to, political reality often forces them back to it eventually (or something worse, due to inconsitency).
I'm increasingy despondent about the state of things, because we're not at the stage of agreeing what the problems are, so of course we cannot get solutions.
Really don't like the fully automated line calling at Wimbledon. There was really drama in the call and the challenge and waiting for Hawkeye to show the result.
1) The misogyny in British politics is appalling. They have attacked Reeves from day 1 as a woman - how dare she be appointed Chancellor! I have little doubt that politics at that level can be an emotional roller-coaster and some people are emotional beings.
I cried in a senior leadership meeting because the situation was that fraught. I can imagine me crying in a situation like that, or when Theresa May quit. As a bloke I get sympathy, but women get none. "too emotional" - how many times does that get added as a label to a colleague just because they are a woman?
That being said
2) Reeves is absolutely done. If she has something upsetting going on in her personal life then my sympathies - don't get her sat in the spotlight blubbing. A failing of the management team letting her sit there. If that's just cover then its my sexist patronising guff.
Problem is that she is Chancellor of the Exchequer and needs to be robust enough to face down critics and the markets and opposition idiots. Crying doesn't work. And she can't recover - even if she goes on in the role she will always be the chancellor reduced to tears as her boss fails to defend her position.
"misogyny"
oh do fk off Labour is the party that hasnt had a woman leader.
Starmer will shoot Reeves because he has a woman problem
When he goes Labour will elect another man to replace him.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
He can waltz back in and take over on current performance.
Magic Grandpa will come back and the faithful will cheer him
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
Which is the makings of a problem, as anyone who thinks there are alternatives who could both get the seats to form a government and in addition govern competently and seriously is making a substantial error of judgment. The only conceivable options thus far are, obviously, the Tories and Reform. Neither qualify.
You do seem to be very Labour but to be honest anything can happen going forward
It is far from a given Labour will form the next government especially after this week
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
I'm not convinced he's ever really wanted a new party. He dragged his feet for years despite yearning from his supporters and only left Labour after 40 years because it was literally impossible for him to stand for Parliament without being expelled. Speaking at rallies and co-operating with the Gaza bros seems like it must be pretty fulfilling for his ambitions, and it feels like the only reason there's still talk of it on a slow schedule is some will start being frustrated if there is no some forward momentum.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
Daveys problem, as elucidated in polling today by FoN is very few say they know what he or the LDs stand for, less than all the others. He is pulling protest/NOTA votes but faces a big squeeze if he cant show some vision of an LD world
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
I'm not convinced he's ever really wanted a new party. He dragged his feet for years despite yearning from his supporters and only left Labour after 40 years because it was literally impossible for him to stand for Parliament without being expelled. Speaking at rallies and co-operating with the Gaza bros seems like it must be pretty fulfilling for his ambitions, and it feels like the only reason there's still talk of it on a slow schedule is some will start being frustrated if there is no some forward momentum.
In the end i think he will start it and depart from any leading role very quickly. Hes done the leader thing but i do think thr clamour for a party will force his hand and Labour are ripe for picking off. If not him, the Greens will evolve and do it
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
They're not. They're not serious at all. One of the many good parts about Kemi's excellent PMQs was that she called out all the other parties for not supporting welfare reform.
To think, when Starmer did his bleating 'I'm a lovable lefty really' u-turn on his Enoch tribute speech, I really thought things couldn't get any better for Kemi this week - but little did I know.
She had the most golden opportunity any LOTO will ever have to be honest, but boy did she stick it in the net.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
I'm not convinced he's ever really wanted a new party. He dragged his feet for years despite yearning from his supporters and only left Labour after 40 years because it was literally impossible for him to stand for Parliament without being expelled. Speaking at rallies and co-operating with the Gaza bros seems like it must be pretty fulfilling for his ambitions, and it feels like the only reason there's still talk of it on a slow schedule is some will start being frustrated if there is no some forward momentum.
In the end i think he will start it and depart from any leading role very quickly. Hes done the leader thing but i do think thr clamour for a party will force his hand and Labour are ripe for picking off. If not him, the Greens will evolve and do it
I got the impression he and McDonnell liked the idea of being elder statesmen after years of being backbenchers, I assume his concern is about whether it will hold together without him as the formal focal point. Not that he's above promotion - as I find amusing his peace and justice project page is still listed as 'thecorbynproject'.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He could hire Bobby Vylan as party spokesman - going to be looking for a new career now anyway and the basic level political sloganeering and capturing the Glastonbury vote is aligned.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
Daveys problem, as elucidated in polling today by FoN is very few say they know what he or the LDs stand for, less than all the others. He is pulling protest/NOTA votes but faces a big squeeze if he cant show some vision of an LD world
We have two problems: 1) We have lots of big & bold ideas but struggle to distill them into clear policies and then punchy political messages 2) Even if 1 wasn't true the media would ignore us anyway
Davey and his team got it - go out and create unmissable scenes which the MSM have to report - then you get to talk policy. We can't repeat the same exercise. Personally I think the way forward is social media - punchy reels on TikTok and Instagram. But what do I know.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
The days of Starmer/Reeves are numbered now. The only question now is when the regime change happens.
Commeth the hour, commeth the Angela, and Labour's fortunes revive....
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
They're not. They're not serious at all. One of the many good parts about Kemi's excellent PMQs was that she called out all the other parties for not supporting welfare reform.
To think, when Starmer did his bleating 'I'm a lovable lefty really' u-turn on his Enoch tribute speech, I really thought things couldn't get any better for Kemi this week - but little did I know.
She had the most golden opportunity any LOTO will ever have to be honest, but boy did she stick it in the net.
But the Tories don't support welfare reform either. Performative cruelty to disabled people is not welfare reform.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
John Crace critical of Tories? Say it aint so!
Quite. The visceral reaction of a Labour supporter to someone demolishing their pet project is hardly surprising.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
The days of Starmer/Reeves are numbered now. The only question now is when the regime change happens.
Commeth the hour, commeth the Angela, and Labour's fortunes revive....
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
There were a ton of unfunded spending commitments. That's a fact. Whether it benefits from being termed "£22b black hole" and to what extent incoming Labour genuinely didn't know about it, I don't know.
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
currently Labour are racking up a £22bn black hole about every 6 weeks. And its getting worse
Sure they are, Alan. And the Tories eat babies. Etc.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
I've said it before, Kemi Badenoch needs to be more modest and self effacing.
You know you've hit rock bottom when I am calling out somebody for a lack of modesty and self effacing behaviour.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
I'm not convinced he's ever really wanted a new party. He dragged his feet for years despite yearning from his supporters and only left Labour after 40 years because it was literally impossible for him to stand for Parliament without being expelled. Speaking at rallies and co-operating with the Gaza bros seems like it must be pretty fulfilling for his ambitions, and it feels like the only reason there's still talk of it on a slow schedule is some will start being frustrated if there is no some forward momentum.
In the end i think he will start it and depart from any leading role very quickly. Hes done the leader thing but i do think thr clamour for a party will force his hand and Labour are ripe for picking off. If not him, the Greens will evolve and do it
I got the impression he and McDonnell liked the idea of being elder statesmen after years of being backbenchers, I assume his concern is about whether it will hold together without him as the formal focal point. Not that he's above promotion - as I find amusing his peace and justice project page is still listed as 'thecorbynproject'.
McDonnell is far too wedded to Labour to ever leave. We will see with Magic G, i can see him setting up a vehicle to hand over to a hand picked successor - Sultana perhaps but she is pushing her luck on the PA stuff. It might just end up a formal Gaza 'Indy' party.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
That’s very unfair of you. Don’t you remember her sympathy for Sunak and Hunt when they were trying to deal with crazy inflation caused by Covid and Ukraine. When she would defend them on tv and say, “be fair Alistair Campbell, (for it was he) these guys are doing a very hard job under very difficult circumstances not of their design or making.”
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
There were a ton of unfunded spending commitments. That's a fact. Whether it benefits from being termed "£22b black hole" and to what extent incoming Labour genuinely didn't know about it, I don't know.
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
currently Labour are racking up a £22bn black hole about every 6 weeks. And its getting worse
Sure they are, Alan. And the Tories eat babies. Etc.
We borrowed £17.7 billion in May maybe I should make that £22bn in 5 weeks
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He could hire Bobby Vylan as party spokesman - going to be looking for a new career now anyway and the basic level political sloganeering and capturing the Glastonbury vote is aligned.
They could call themselves the Palestine ReAction Party.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He could hire Bobby Vylan as party spokesman - going to be looking for a new career now anyway and the basic level political sloganeering and capturing the Glastonbury vote is aligned.
I think Bobby Vylan has had a major increase in streams since the weekend. For an edgy musician you just can't buy that sort of publicity, just ask Bill Grundy.
I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
Daveys problem, as elucidated in polling today by FoN is very few say they know what he or the LDs stand for, less than all the others. He is pulling protest/NOTA votes but faces a big squeeze if he cant show some vision of an LD world
We have two problems: 1) We have lots of big & bold ideas but struggle to distill them into clear policies and then punchy political messages 2) Even if 1 wasn't true the media would ignore us anyway
Davey and his team got it - go out and create unmissable scenes which the MSM have to report - then you get to talk policy. We can't repeat the same exercise. Personally I think the way forward is social media - punchy reels on TikTok and Instagram. But what do I know.
New is good are the watchwords. Davey loses a seat for every hobby horse or paddle board from today
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He could hire Bobby Vylan as party spokesman - going to be looking for a new career now anyway and the basic level political sloganeering and capturing the Glastonbury vote is aligned.
I think Bobby Vylan has had a major increase in streams since the weekend. For an edgy musician you just can't buy that sort of publicity, just ask Bill Grundy.
That's part of the problem with 'edgyness' of course, it's so easy to then fake or phone in to please or outrage the people you want.
It's akin to the pathetic displays boxers engage in with stare offs and stage managed 'rows' before fights to drive up interest, which is like watching WWE monologues without the charisma or honesty.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
I hope Ed Davey and his team are putting together some serious and practical plans. After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
They're not. They're not serious at all. One of the many good parts about Kemi's excellent PMQs was that she called out all the other parties for not supporting welfare reform.
To think, when Starmer did his bleating 'I'm a lovable lefty really' u-turn on his Enoch tribute speech, I really thought things couldn't get any better for Kemi this week - but little did I know.
She had the most golden opportunity any LOTO will ever have to be honest, but boy did she stick it in the net.
But the Tories don't support welfare reform either. Performative cruelty to disabled people is not welfare reform.
Labour's original bill was cruel to genuinely disabled people, because it simply top-sliced £5bn off everyone in a completely arbitrary way. The Tories are in favour of reforming the system so that the genuinely disabled are protected, and those with very low level mental conditions that would actually be helped by work (not to mention those just ripping the piss) are encouraged into work. Unless you believe that one in four people is genuinely disabled, that is what any sensible person or party should support.
On a human level, I have a huge amount of persona sympathy for Rachel Reeves.
But if you applied for a job - perhaps with a slightly juiced-up CV - which you got, but then found you weren't up to doing that job, should I have any personal sympathy if you have a meltdown?
I’m pretty sure she caused a few people meltdowns when adding VAT to private school fees and gave absolutely zero fks and no personal sympathy.
It's difficult to feel too much sympathy when you look back at how arrogant she was before the election:
Wow. All the seeds are there indeed. The arrogance, the refusal to debate, the absence of ideas, and - most of all - a kind of panic when she thinks her mediocrity and unsuitability for the job has been exposed
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
Her predecessor was Anneliese Dodds so a low bar one might argue. Whatever you may think of Alastair Darling or Gordon Brown, they weren't afraid to come out swinging for their policies.
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
Starmer and Reeves should have held fast on WFP and this, but they were frit and are now paying the price
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
And yea out of the desert there came a man and his name was Jezza.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
His fans will be so disappointed, they've wanted him to form his own party for so long and he hasn't yet done it even after leaving Labour.
Hes 'in discussions' apparently and says a new party will be up and running by next years locals. Too slow. He needs to start it, get the likes of Sultana, Whittome etc on board, then hand over once its established cos hes too old now. If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He could hire Bobby Vylan as party spokesman - going to be looking for a new career now anyway and the basic level political sloganeering and capturing the Glastonbury vote is aligned.
I think Bobby Vylan has had a major increase in streams since the weekend. For an edgy musician you just can't buy that sort of publicity, just ask Bill Grundy.
There is no money in stream revenue for regular artists these days. Festivals and big US Arena tours are where the money to make a proper living are.
What you need to do is walk the line between being edgy but not be dropped by your record label / management. RATM managed to stay on Sony for instance. Winning all the way to the bank.
Before the PB Tories think that today was a triumph for their side, it wasn't. As John Crace notes: "The thing with Kemi is that her manner is so off-putting. That weird sense of superiority when she has so little to be superior about. The arrogance and the condescension. The perpetual sneer. The feeling she is permanently doing the rest of us a favour. All of which makes it hard to like her. Your sympathies are naturally drawn to whoever her opponent happens to be."
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
The days of Starmer/Reeves are numbered now. The only question now is when the regime change happens.
Commeth the hour, commeth the Angela, and Labour's fortunes revive....
It does look / sound / feel like a serious vibe shift. For all that Starmer can stand there saying "breakfast clubs" as a defence for his government they look like they have run out of ideas. OK so there is Big News to announce about NHS England and maybe it will actually be big. But we've been here before, the PM is politically naive and frit, so the idea of Wes Streeting persuading him of systemic structural scrap the market reforms feels unlikely.
So yes, I agree with you. Angie is the obvious candidate who will get pushed forward, though I have no doubt that the right will try and advance someone like Liz Kendall only less awful, and Andy Burnham will continue to smoulder away up north.
Thing is, Starmer ran on CHANGE. If he is ousted and a new PM brings about a new platform and a new direction, they would have the same lack of a mandate as May / Boris / Lettuce / Rishi had when first parachuted in. Labour rightly attacked the Tories for this but look set to repeat the stupidity...
Comments
Getting Bethall into the line-up helps as then you have Root and Bethall as right / left arm spinners to get in some extra overs.
https://youtube.com/@archivemediavault?si=Qp0h9mXvHR1zPp2_
https://youtube.com/@flickvault?si=G_f7s9-fpppXiQK_
https://youtube.com/@playforforever?si=60G3WTjw26PUQdDo
https://youtube.com/@softly1-p6k?si=AfbV4vxJeg_j8kmB
https://youtube.com/@stevefbs?si=zSDj3rgzq6GoXxd-
https://youtube.com/@tvgreats?si=b1YpKY9ui30kxFwc and tvgreats2
https://youtube.com/@rgm501?si=vu7khjqG_5pO-eF_
As well as some not updated for a while.
From the point you made
2010......say 350k over 45's claiming....2025 350k over 45's claiming
2010......say 50k under 45's claiming......2025 125k under 45's claiming
Yes the number of over 45's claiming is bigger but the rise in claims is down to under 45's
yksi, kaksi, kolme…
b) these are the same brothers in Orange that would have let Jeremy Corbyn be Prime Minister in 2017 unless they were bribed with more than a billion pounds by the hapless May government?
c) they aren't our brothers anyway, generally no more than distantly related and rather embarrassingly primitive cousins to the lowland Scots
d) they only want to remain British because of the £15-20 billion/year we send over there. If we stopped that, their Unionism would dry up pretty quickly.
The sooner they're gone, the better. They and the Irish deserve each other.
And it has now been exposed and she’s in tears
My diminished sympathy has vanished
It just about worked in the much more deferential world of the 1970s, when floating exchange rates were new and the difference between them and the fixed rate regime of Bretton Woods wasn't really understood.
It won't work at all in the world of the 2020s, where we trust the political and business elite much less and there's no credible reason for us to take on such a loan - unless maybe we commit the ultimate idiocy of joining the EU and the Euro, but fortunately we've just about avoided that.
I'm afraid there's no shortcut or quick fix from Washington or anywhere else - we need a government that commits to implementing economic policies that work in the medium to long term, backed by a plurality of the electorate that supports them. The IMF won't get us there - even if their program works (and lots of theirs haven't), it wouldn't be legitimate and would soon be unwound.
I also remember her sympathy after the election where she thanked Sunak and Hunt for stabilising things and helping bring inflation down so her inheritance was not as terrible as it could have been rather than fucking the economy by talking it down and making up stories about £20b black holes for purely political purposes.
So please, be fair to Rachel and have some sympathy.
On Wednesday, Downing Street insisted Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was "not going anywhere" after her tearful appearance in the House of Commons during prime minister's questions sparked speculation about her political future.
The Ipsos poll also found that two-thirds of British adults are not confident Labour has the right plans to change the way the benefits system works in the UK, including nearly half of 2024 Labour voters.
Keiran Pedley, director of UK Politics at Ipsos, said: "Labour rows over welfare reform haven't just harmed the public's view on whether they can make the right changes in that policy area, they are raising wider questions about their ability to govern too.
"The public is starting to doubt Labour's ability to govern competently and seriously at the same levels they did with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak's governments. Labour will hope that this government doesn't end up going the same way."
Labour just doesn't seem to have an "Iron Chancellor" type - it's one thing doing the prawn cocktail circuit before the election but quite another to sit in No.11 and take the hard decisions
If you disagree, if you think there is a form of words that works, then excellent. The role of national saviour is yours.
b) The DUP were never going to vote with pro SF Corbyn, at most they might have abstained so just got funds from May to avoid that
c) They are Protestant British patriots, indeed often more loving of King and country and flag than left liberals in our big cities
d) They have been pro British since the Battle of the Boyne and deserve the support of all true Tories and rightwingers, indeed Farage is also close to the DUP and TUV
Despite the criticism she's had for her lack of economic nous, CoE is essentially a political role. You have a treasury to do the economics, but you need to be the public face of it. But she's arguably even worse at that than she is at underatanding the economics. You need to inspire some confidence. And bluntly, seeing the CoE crying doesn't inspire confidence.
She is, by a country mile, the worst chancellor of my lifetime.* Could you imagine Hunt, Sunak, Javid, Darling, Osborne or Brown screwing up quite this badly?
* Yes of course I include Kwarteng in that list. Even he is a titan by comparison.
The $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion) technology giant will shed 4pc of its workforce, it confirmed on Wednesday, with redundancies hitting divisions including its Xbox arm and King, its mobile games studios.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/07/02/microsoft-to-cut-9000-jobs-as-chatbots-take-over/
Listening to labour mps, it seems they want to move to the left and would welcome Starmer and Reeves leaving office
The debate yesterday was a revelation with the left in full vocal opposition to the PIP proposals, and after today's astonishing PMQs they must be on manoeuvres and scent blood
Norway and Switzerland both watching closely, as both intend to try and top the group to avoid the likelihood of having to play Spain first in the KOs.
I don't know if there's any residual foreign currency debt remaining - but if there is it'll be 30 year stuff that it's in very final years.
When, for example, I can't switch the lights on in my kitchen because I don't have a password...
On the messaging and politics they were going for their version of the Cons "clearing up Labour's mess" - which ran successfully for the best part of a decade. But it doesn't seem to have worked for even a fortnight.
It's time for a shar.
Bizarrely, I have just come across a house where the owner has occupied as much again as his back garden of one of our local green spaces as an extension. It's not just a summer sitting area; he's put a fence round it with a new back gate and a stone pathway. I've seen that in London, and major turf wars over 3ft nicked, but up here we are normally more restrained.
Google link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/scRKKb7XqBgoWdaJ9
'One prick and they're both gone.'
Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.
Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.
Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.
Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."
Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”
Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"
Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.
"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."
"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/16/vince-cable-wife_n_4608721.html
With that being said I do think the student politician line still generally works as an attack, to indicate a lack of nuance and growth as a politician. Not that you always need to compromise when a senior politician, or that performative utterances are not a thing either, but just a lack of recognition of when to dial it back.
1) The misogyny in British politics is appalling. They have attacked Reeves from day 1 as a woman - how dare she be appointed Chancellor! I have little doubt that politics at that level can be an emotional roller-coaster and some people are emotional beings.
I cried in a senior leadership meeting because the situation was that fraught. I can imagine me crying in a situation like that, or when Theresa May quit. As a bloke I get sympathy, but women get none. "too emotional" - how many times does that get added as a label to a colleague just because they are a woman?
That being said
2) Reeves is absolutely done. If she has something upsetting going on in her personal life then my sympathies - don't get her sat in the spotlight blubbing. A failing of the management team letting her sit there. If that's just cover then its my sexist patronising guff.
Problem is that she is Chancellor of the Exchequer and needs to be robust enough to face down critics and the markets and opposition idiots. Crying doesn't work. And she can't recover - even if she goes on in the role she will always be the chancellor reduced to tears as her boss fails to defend her position.
Cant be too long until he's back in the fold.
One of my political philosophies is assume politicians will take the easiest option, and it rarely lets me down - even when they try not to, political reality often forces them back to it eventually (or something worse, due to inconsitency).
I'm increasingy despondent about the state of things, because we're not at the stage of agreeing what the problems are, so of course we cannot get solutions.
From the Racing Post, which is mainly exercised about the threat to racing but this would apply to political betting as well:-
The Treasury is busy consulting on plans to replace the existing three-tax structure of online gambling duties with a single Remote Betting and Gaming Duty. Under the current regime, betting on racing and other sports is subject to a 15 per cent duty, but there are fears the government's plans could lead to it being aligned with the 21 per cent rate levied on games of chance such as online casino and slots.
https://www.racingpost.com/news/britain/racing-tax/bha-issues-urgent-call-to-arms-to-axe-the-racing-tax-over-fears-of-66-million-hit-to-the-sports-finances-a6uSs8G6xgHo/
As importantly, it shows that government really does not understand the difference between games of skill and chance.
Same at the cricket.
oh do fk off Labour is the party that hasnt had a woman leader.
Starmer will shoot Reeves because he has a woman problem
When he goes Labour will elect another man to replace him.
Magic Grandpa will come back and the faithful will cheer him
Still at least he will have some policies.
After all, next time it’s either them or Reform.
It is far from a given Labour will form the next government especially after this week
If he cant see right now is optimum hes even more of a daft old goat than i thought
He is pulling protest/NOTA votes but faces a big squeeze if he cant show some vision of an LD world
Meanwhile Reform are still the same old clueless creepy weirdo’s.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/02/starmer-tearful-chancellor-rachel-reeves-pmqs
As I said, I think Reeves is done. But the beneficiary will not be Badenoch or the Tories. The drift of the Labour last time voters to Reform will speed up - the Tories failed them, Labour failed them, vote for something else.
To think, when Starmer did his bleating 'I'm a lovable lefty really' u-turn on his Enoch tribute speech, I really thought things couldn't get any better for Kemi this week - but little did I know.
She had the most golden opportunity any LOTO will ever have to be honest, but boy did she stick it in the net.
1) We have lots of big & bold ideas but struggle to distill them into clear policies and then punchy political messages
2) Even if 1 wasn't true the media would ignore us anyway
Davey and his team got it - go out and create unmissable scenes which the MSM have to report - then you get to talk policy. We can't repeat the same exercise. Personally I think the way forward is social media - punchy reels on TikTok and Instagram. But what do I know.
Commeth the hour, commeth the Angela, and Labour's fortunes revive....
You know you've hit rock bottom when I am calling out somebody for a lack of modesty and self effacing behaviour.
It's akin to the pathetic displays boxers engage in with stare offs and stage managed 'rows' before fights to drive up interest, which is like watching WWE monologues without the charisma or honesty.
What you need to do is walk the line between being edgy but not be dropped by your record label / management. RATM managed to stay on Sony for instance. Winning all the way to the bank.
So yes, I agree with you. Angie is the obvious candidate who will get pushed forward, though I have no doubt that the right will try and advance someone like Liz Kendall only less awful, and Andy Burnham will continue to smoulder away up north.
Thing is, Starmer ran on CHANGE. If he is ousted and a new PM brings about a new platform and a new direction, they would have the same lack of a mandate as May / Boris / Lettuce / Rishi had when first parachuted in. Labour rightly attacked the Tories for this but look set to repeat the stupidity...