I see that Nottingham, London and Birmingham are taking, or planning to take, unofficial flags down.
Does anyone have a wider knowledge?
They have to take them down. Otherwise they are inviting everyone and anyone to hijack the public realm with their own pet causes. If people want to plaster their own property with England flags that's their prerogative, but they can't do it on public property.
The local council took down the Welsh flags over the Little Orme for them to be replaced with larger Welsh and Union Jacks flags higher up and social media telling the council 'You take them down, we will put them back up' !!!!
Shame people are willing to waste council taxpayers money on these silly displays of nationalism (often organised by far right activists, who know exactly what they are doing).
Hardly far right with the Welsh Flag being flown
It depends on why it has been put up on a day other than match day. If it is used like some people use the flag of St George as a symbol that "foreigners" aren't welcome it could be.
Personally, I quite like the England and UK flags. It just feels nice to have my flag flown. This must be what gay people feel like in June and August. Hurray, some people don't despise me. Only in the UK do we get hot and bothered about people flying national flags. Go to Greece, for example: the Greek flag is everywhere.
There is nothing wrong with a flag. The problem arises when the flag is displayed as a threat rather than a celebration.
And how do you discern that when looking at said flag?
If a flag of St George is taped to a lamp post in Sparkhill I am guessing it is a threat. If it is hanging outside Buck House it is probably a celebration.
That said I am making a subjective analysis so in both cases I may be wrong.
Why is the flag of England a threat to England?
It is sometimes flown as a warning to me. Keep off our turf Taffy!
Well not really! On my occasional visits to Wales I don't interpret the Welsh flag as 'stay away Sice'.
Even though that is essentially the point of the red dragon (which, according to my hazily remembered mythology, fought with the white dragon of the Saxons in the skies above Oxford.) I don't think that's why the Welsh fly it. It's flown because it's a rather nice flag and a symbol of liking being Welsh.
Had 240kg of fuel on board when it landed, that’s the car equivalent of doing 50 miles with the light on. They’d have been unable to go around at Manchester. Ryanair are going to get the book thrown at them by the AAIB.
That's well beyond tea with no biscuits. I wonder if they told the passengers they were hitting the ground one way or another on final approach?
The diversion to Edinburgh was always going to be iffy given the storm. Why not Manchester immediately?
This is the first season since 1935-36 - 90 years ago - that the Manchester United first team hasn't included a player who played at some point under either Sir Matt Busby or Sir Alex Ferguson.
Changes from 1st October [Find Out Now, 8th October, N=2,668]
Highest ever Green VI in a poll
Zackly what the Greens were hoping for when they elected an articulate populist as leader.
What's happened to the Your party, by the way? Have they given up? Green appear to have largely hoovered up the left wing extremist vote.
Still bubbling under and best advised to stay there imo. Polanski looks to have it covered.
I reckon the name recognition if Corbyn will take at least half of the remaining Lab VI unless they ditch SKS and veer leftwards.
As I say I think Green plus Your Party will get circa 30% with Lab on 10% if they ploughman's the austerity furrow.
BTW Beth Rigby hasn't a clue re SKS marvellous speech as proved by the unbounce
That's a bold prediction - I'd say you could get good odds on Lab 10% if there's a market. I'd have thought it more likely that the Corbyn/Sultana party would eat into the Green share.
(I'm assuming 'ploughman's' is a predictive text error for 'plough' - I'm guessing therefore this is a word you type a lot! We've unearthed BJO's favourite pub lunch...)
My working assumption on all this flag business is: - Union Flag the right way up = more patriotic than racist - Union Flag the wrong way up = more racist than patriotic
Ultimately the people who are putting them up are doing so to make people not born here or born here but to parents from overseas feel uncomfortable. You can be fine with that or not, I am not. Even if some of them look good.
My assumption is that people putting them up are doing so in order to make 'those in charge' - (e.g. local councils, government ... I don't think any more thinking than that has gone into it) feel uncomfortable. Since they so clearly do. I don't think people born overseas feel uncomfortable at flags. I don't feel uncomfortable at other countries' flags when I go abroad. But I'm guessing rather.
Say what you like about Trump he does seem to have pulled off this Gaza peace deal with reports he is flying to Israel on Sunday
I don't think Trump has pulled off this peace deal. I think the people who wrote it + US diplomats + changing circumstances have made it become possible. Trump has helped in that process.
It could and should have happened a long time ago. The ceasefire and hostage release, I mean. A genuine lasting peace deal is something else. If that is in due course achieved, fantastic, and Trump will for once merit praise and plaudits.
Indeed, I've been saying for years this war should end with the surrender of Hamas, their disarmament and removal from office and the release of all hostages.
Many people here have been opposing demanding the surrender of Hamas, calling demanding that "unrealistic" or "genocide" and other such bullshit.
Much bloodshed could have been avoided if Hamas had surrendered and released the hostages sooner, but kudos to Israel for not accepting a ceasefire before they did. Good job.
And no mythical "genocide".
A lot of people here have egg on their face.
That's as dumb and offensive as somebody equally fanatical on the other side of this cursed conflict calling October 7th a 'good job'.
Don't set it off again. Every time I come on here and the ant is pissing of his hill I get a little closer to releasing the PT blocking extension*
*patent pending, £10 a month, Firefox only, guaranteed to reduce your blood pressure and extend your life.
Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plan “will not resolve” illegal Channel crossings, the head of the Calais region has claimed.
Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, also said the “one in, one out” migrant swap scheme agreed between the UK and France risks exacerbating the small boats crisis by creating both illegal and legal ways to make the crossing.
Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plan “will not resolve” illegal Channel crossings, the head of the Calais region has claimed.
Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, also said the “one in, one out” migrant swap scheme agreed between the UK and France risks exacerbating the small boats crisis by creating both illegal and legal ways to make the crossing.
That’s not what he is saying - the fact ID cards won’t be available until 2029 means it doesn’t solve the problem today
Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plan “will not resolve” illegal Channel crossings, the head of the Calais region has claimed.
Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, also said the “one in, one out” migrant swap scheme agreed between the UK and France risks exacerbating the small boats crisis by creating both illegal and legal ways to make the crossing.
So if the French hate it put me now down as a supporter of Starmer’s digital ID.
I remember once @Benpointer saying “wake me up when a robot can stack my dishwasher”
Well, here it is, Ben. About two years after you asked for it. These will soon start appearing in posh hotels, then exponentially spread
Except it still can't stack your dishwasher. That demo is all tele-operatored or mimic the teleoperated demostration. The marketing copy is very careful in using phrases like "designed to operate in". It makes no claims beyond its a platform that has the potential to be trained to do x. But teleoperated robot arms / robot arms that are shown a task and asked to repeat have been able to manipulate plates, glasses etc for quite a long time, the huge difficult is the robot doing it all itself and generalising away from mimicing.
What they are showing off is that the robot is now containing a lot more sensors that can be potentially leveraged to learn to do tasks.
I remember once @Benpointer saying “wake me up when a robot can stack my dishwasher”
Well, here it is, Ben. About two years after you asked for it. These will soon start appearing in posh hotels, then exponentially spread
X tells me it is 'age restricted adult content'. Is it a naked robot stacking the dishwasher?
That must be the UK’s Online Safety Act (I’m in San Francisco so it doesn’t apply). An apt example of its stupidity
The video shows a new humanoid robot doing lots of boring chores, quite slowly and arthritically, but also carefully, methodically, dextrously. The robots are here and they’re coming for ALL our jobs. The Chinese already sell robots of this kind
A good moment, then, to discuss UBI. Unemployment is about to explode as millions then billions of jobs are automated
Had 240kg of fuel on board when it landed, that’s the car equivalent of doing 50 miles with the light on. They’d have been unable to go around at Manchester. Ryanair are going to get the book thrown at them by the AAIB.
That's well beyond tea with no biscuits. I wonder if they told the passengers they were hitting the ground one way or another on final approach?
The diversion to Edinburgh was always going to be iffy given the storm. Why not Manchester immediately?
We’ll find out soon enough, because there’s an AAIB field investigation ongoing, which is the one that results in a 100 page report on a good day. And that’s not going to be a good day. The airline and the pilots had ample opportunity to make better decisions.
This is potentially the report that digs right into the Ryanair culture and pushes back on it.
I remember once @Benpointer saying “wake me up when a robot can stack my dishwasher”
Well, here it is, Ben. About two years after you asked for it. These will soon start appearing in posh hotels, then exponentially spread
X tells me it is 'age restricted adult content'. Is it a naked robot stacking the dishwasher?
That must be the UK’s Online Safety Act (I’m in San Francisco so it doesn’t apply). An apt example of its stupidity
The video shows a new humanoid robot doing lots of boring chores, quite slowly and arthritically, but also carefully, methodically, dextrously. The robots are here and they’re coming for ALL our jobs. The Chinese already sell robots of this kind
A good moment, then, to discuss UBI. Unemployment is about to explode as millions then billions of jobs are automated
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
Good morning
And giveover
Badenoch gave a totally unexpected and successful speech that galvanised her audience and has given her party lots of policies, and of scrapping stamp duty has been well received from think tanks and Paul Johnson formally of the IFS who said yesterday it is the worst of many bad taxes
Your mixture of cynicism and satire is par for the cop* but at least this conservative is pleased to see conservative policies and Jenrick put back in his box
I don't believe I was being remotely cynical or satirical. If you want satire I can write all day about letter boxes and an offensive description of a smile.
You would be the first to criticise ( and justifiably so) an unfunded Reeves pledge. And make no mistake there is nothing in the credit column to match the tax cut in the debit column, except for a nebulous notion of cutting wastage.
If she has done enough to put Jenrick back in his box and take some points from Reform I'll drink to that, but my point stands, her welcome tax cut debit does not demonstrate a corresponding credit.
*If you don't like me posting on here you could always ask TSE politely to transfer me from "member" to " applicant" status, that way I can still access and read your posts but no longer post myself. There, that seems like a neat compromise.
At times you really are very silly as demonstrated by your last paragraph
4.5 billion cost as quoted by the IFS is eminently doable
I do apologise for my figures, I misinterpreted what you were writing. You were claiming that stamp duty only generated the Government £4.5b, I misinterpreted that, not least because I was under the misapprehension that the £11.6b figure was cast iron.
The widely accepted figure for stamp duty credit yesterday was £11.6b down from a little over £12b on the previous measurement timescale. I thought even Kemi accepted the stamp duty saving as £9b, although if you say it is only £4.5b I would be surprised, but £4.5b it is.
Nonetheless, how are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Thank you for your comments and in the scheme of things 4.5 billion is small beer
LOL! I won't be offering to buy you a pint!
You haven't answered my question. How are you paying for that £4.5b shortfall? Nebulous growth wishcasting and bogus service cost savings don't count.
Badenoch announced the end of ev and heat pump subsidies - that accounts for 2.5 billion alone
Yet another example of Badenoch inventing wild numbers. The EV subsidy is capped at £650 million over three years and the heat pump subsidy at £295 million for just one year, nowhere near £2.5 billion per year. It's so illiterate and lazy. If the Conservatives could spend just five minutes on Google if they wanted to "fully cost" their proposals
If so, I accept your revised figures to circa 1 billion pa, but the abolition of stamp duty is now a top priority for the conservatives endorsed by think tanks and many others
It is a bad tax, but more widely Badenoch has put forward a platform of policies that were previously missing and has energised the party
I doubt it will make a big difference in the immediate polling, but this is a four year trek to the next GE and certainly reducing Jenrick's hopes are an even more positive
I think everyone is on board with dumping stamp duty, but some of us are keen to see how it is being paid for.
Maybe Reeves steals Tory clothes.
After disinfecting them, presumably.
One side effect - or intentional effect - to watch out for would be on the fiscal autonomy of the devolved administrations. The tax is devolved; its replacement might not be.
Yes and I understand that, and it may well just be England only but the Scottish and Welsh governments would come under pressure to follow
I hadn't realised that stamp duty was devolved, and how much higher it is for more valuable properties in Scotland. Just check out the difference for, say, a £700K property. £25k in England. £42k in Scotland. Absolutely insane.
Part of the problem there is there are less 700k houses in Scotland than England, there's prob more in SW London alone. So they keep the rates on expensive properties high. Be a right laugh trying to calculate the tax if its a second home!
My daughter's sale just now saw the buyer at the beginning of the chain here in Wales thinking he had to pay £69,000 duty only to be recalculated as it was an investment at £116,000 so lots of last minute panic and price renegotiations
An investment where you have to pony up £116k which would have to be covered by above inflation increases or some hefty rental income. Are we at peak housing?
And have to agree with you that Kemi had a good conference if only because she actually announced some policies that people can have a look at. Where those policies have originated will be interesting to find out as CCHQ don't seem to have the resources to develop policy. Any ideas where these policy ideas are coming from?
I remember once @Benpointer saying “wake me up when a robot can stack my dishwasher”
Well, here it is, Ben. About two years after you asked for it. These will soon start appearing in posh hotels, then exponentially spread
X tells me it is 'age restricted adult content'. Is it a naked robot stacking the dishwasher?
That must be the UK’s Online Safety Act (I’m in San Francisco so it doesn’t apply). An apt example of its stupidity
The video shows a new humanoid robot doing lots of boring chores, quite slowly and arthritically, but also carefully, methodically, dextrously. The robots are here and they’re coming for ALL our jobs. The Chinese already sell robots of this kind
A good moment, then, to discuss UBI. Unemployment is about to explode as millions then billions of jobs are automated
I managed to see the video on my laptop.
As did I. There are obvious workarounds which I shall not name because the mods told me off
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Where did I say Government money is wisely spent? Central and local government are profligate. I can give you one of manifold examples of each. From central government we have the PPE scandal and from local government we have the £63m invisible Garden Bridge over the Thames.
Those savings Badenoch has claimed to have in mind I would question; why was the saving not implemented up to July 2024?
Because grinding out efficiency savings takes discipline and hard work, not words commonly associated with Boris Johnson.
Plus we had Covid and Brexit in between.
But it’s also a facile point. Would it have been better if the headcount had never gone up? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t reduce it now
Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened
Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'
She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep
And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage
Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both
The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser
I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance
Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?
Pound shop Liz Truss.
No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut
It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators
She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees
Add in banning doctor strikes
This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform
This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.
Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.
Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.
That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.
Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”
True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.
If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.
It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).
The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)
And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.
Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.
PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.
Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.
Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.
They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.
They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.
You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.
Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.
A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.
Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.
In 2009-10 the uk government spent £739 billion. In 2025-6 they are budgeted to spend £1,335 billion.
According to the Bank of England, £739 billion in 2009/10 is equivalent to £1,077 billion today.
So in real terms the government is spending £258 billion more than the Brown government (which was not known for fiscal rectitude).
The only “profoundly unserious” people on here are those who claim that every penny of that is wisely spent and absolutely no savings are possible
Of course not every penny is wisely spent and of course savings are possible, but it's a fantasy to imagine that there are large savings to made from "cutting waste".
Why are we spending £258 billon more? It's not because waste has suddenly multiplied. It's because we have a larger population, an ageing population (more pensions, more healthcare costs), we're paying for COVID-19 (interest on debt + ongoing increased health and disability payments), more generous pensions, we're paying the costs of a war in Ukraine (increased energy costs, aid to Ukraine, increase military spending), and Brexit.
About a third of that is debt interest alone.
And note the choice of 2009/10 as a baseline - the following year debt interest jumped quite sharply, starting its decade and a half rise.
So turning back the clock is going to be massively harder than the comparison implies.
The "we will cut civil service numbers to 2016 levels" also blithely ignores the changes in the civil service consequent on Brexit.
The road back to fiscal rectitude is likely to be a very rocky one, and politicians pretending otherwise are some combination of stupid and dishonest.
I chose the baseline as the last year of Labour’s government
The thing about populism is it always has to be on the right side of opinion - to be popular.
Farage's sole misstep in the 2024 GE was when he advocated a view on the Ukraine which was well out of step with public opinion at the time and he suffered for it.
Simply running to where the focus groups tell you public opinion is on any subject will leave a party completely tied up in an incomprehensible platform of contradictory policies which will make Government either impossible or so riddled with compromises and broken promises as to be entirely discredited.
The other side of this is where a populist leadership tries to offer a more conciliatory or moderate line they are then in danger of losing support because their voter base is often more extreme - immigration being the classic example. Yet the populist leader will, if they have any sense, know that the more they chase their own supporters to the extreme, the more they will repel others.
The art of politics is or should be about arguing a case to the electorate and convincing them it's the right thing to do even when many of the voters will lose out as a result. That's not easy.
There is for example a case to be made for immigration but no one is making it.
Farage’s comments on Ukraine were obviously a result of spending too much time in the US. The American debate on Ukraine in 2024 was very different to, and much more polarised than, the British or European debate. IIRC he was planning to be out there through the summer, and had to come back to the UK when Sunak surprised everyone with the July election.
If Farage is serious about government, he’s going to need a lot more firm policies in place before the next election, and a fully costed manifesto capable of external scrutiny.
He’s also going to need a whole shadow front bench.
He doesn’t appear to have people dedicated to a particular brief.
That’s a good point. He only has 5 or 6 MPs, so he needs to identify new people to both take on a shadow brief and stand in an easily winnable seat.
That probably involves paying at least a dozen of them from party coffers for the next four years, getting them on top of their brief and all over the media - while also not making an arse of themselves by saying something obviously racist.
Farage is a master of this, knowing how to talk about immigration and integration without sounding like Nick Griffin or “Tommy Robinson”.
But it’s a Parliamentry system, and Farage can’t do everything on his own.
And that’s the trouble. Dear Aunty Beeb has allowed, nay encouraged, him to present himself as a one-man movement. That now has to stop.
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Even though that is essentially the point of the red dragon (which, according to my hazily remembered mythology, fought with the white dragon of the Saxons in the skies above Oxford.) I don't think that's why the Welsh fly it. It's flown because it's a rather nice flag and a symbol of liking being Welsh.
The diversion to Edinburgh was always going to be iffy given the storm. Why not Manchester immediately?
https://x.com/michaellcrick/status/1976298912500892152?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
(I'm assuming 'ploughman's' is a predictive text error for 'plough' - I'm guessing therefore this is a word you type a lot! We've unearthed BJO's favourite pub lunch...)
Chat GPT5 has recommended a ban of 88 days.
*patent pending, £10 a month, Firefox only, guaranteed to reduce your blood pressure and extend your life.
https://x.com/cpenguina/status/1976280564471624057
Sir Keir Starmer’s digital ID card plan “will not resolve” illegal Channel crossings, the head of the Calais region has claimed.
Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, also said the “one in, one out” migrant swap scheme agreed between the UK and France risks exacerbating the small boats crisis by creating both illegal and legal ways to make the crossing.
What they are showing off is that the robot is now containing a lot more sensors that can be potentially leveraged to learn to do tasks.
Here in the EU I can see the video of a humanoid robot doing household tasks and not at all thinking of murdering its human masters.
I couldn't sleep with one of these in the house. I've read Service Model.
NEW THREAD
The video shows a new humanoid robot doing lots of boring chores, quite slowly and arthritically, but also carefully, methodically, dextrously. The robots are here and they’re coming for ALL our jobs. The Chinese already sell robots of this kind
A good moment, then, to discuss UBI. Unemployment is about to explode as millions then billions of jobs are automated
This is potentially the report that digs right into the Ryanair culture and pushes back on it.
And have to agree with you that Kemi had a good conference if only because she actually announced some policies that people can have a look at. Where those policies have originated will be interesting to find out as CCHQ don't seem to have the resources to develop policy. Any ideas where these policy ideas are coming from?
Plus we had Covid and Brexit in between.
But it’s also a facile point. Would it have been better if the headcount had never gone up? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t reduce it now