Perceptions versus reality – politicalbetting.com
Perceptions versus reality – politicalbetting.com
How do public perceptions of government spending match with reality?A YouGov experiment put a series of govt spending areas as head to head match-ups and asked Britons to say which they thought more was spent onRead more here: yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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without that information and without knowing what else works we could well end up implement restrictions for 45 of the next 0 pandemics.
Holy shit, England were all out in 33 overs.
It’s the hope that gets you.
There’s almost none of that in the report.
what were good decisions;
what with hindsight were bad decisions;
what information was important;
what information was misleading;
how did the characteristics of this particular disease differ from what had been planned for; and
what processes could be improved.
Some of the stuff coming out of Mahmoos’s plans to extend the waiting time for ILR pushes costs into the future. Her plans seem more rooted to economics than nationalism. Is the hand of the Treasury somewhere in the background guiding these policies?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20508068jno
I’m sure the convicts were over the moon with that decision, but didn’t expect to be batting on it themselves before tea.
This has the potential to be a rare two-day Test Match.
I don't suppose this will register on the news.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQzt21TEgtS/?igsh=MTd5aGs5cTFvODRx
....west London.
I would have had several things in the wrong order for these questions. I would have put pensions, debt interest and social care higher. I thought education, working age benefits and transport were lower.
It's interesting how that maps against my views that I think Britain doesn't prioritise education or transport infrastructure, that pension and social care spending is a huge problem, and that concerns over working age benefits are overdone.
Now, which way is the causality?
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1991352574390227129?s=20
Not to say TNT is bad, but when you know the comms well it’s like watching it with friends. Cooky’s on now at least
To @OnlyLivingBoy point, it looks like Lib Dems are right most often, but not always.
A few willing souls have gone out doing voxpops with Reform voters, asking them to detail their issues, and then listing the actual Reform policies. Which run contrary to their issues with the exception of "there's too many foreigners" which the hard right media project as the summary of all the other problems.
The challenge for Reform is going to be asking people to vote against their own best interest. "I am poor, Reform will make me poorer but cutting welfare and council funding and the health service, but on the other hand I like that Nigel Farage and worry about all these muslim rapists I've been hearing about"
Some will, some won't. Its a fascinating social experiment! Can Reform replicate the success of the GOPDAP in getting poor people in rural areas to make themselves poorer?
Hale (Trafford) council by-election result:
CON: 46.5% (+9.7)
GRN: 38.1% (-9.6)
REF: 8.1% (+8.1)
LAB: 4.2% (-7.6)
LDEM: 3.1% (-0.6)
+/- 2024
andrewteale.me.uk/previews
https://x.com/britainelects/status/1991767290568683739?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
No significant surprises in that polling. It all plays to the misconceptions (or prejudices if you prefer) you would expect. £14 billion on overseas aide isn't a small number but the "big ticket" items are what you'd expect with debt interest an eyewatering £100 billion plus.
The problem is suggesting real term reductions in any of this is going to be a hard political sell - the NHS is venerated, no one is going to voluntarily want to see their benefits reduced (including and especially pensioners). The debt interest isn't ours to control unless we decide to default and if anything spending on defence is going to keep growing.
You could, I suppose, argue the main candidate for long term reduction is education but while we could see spending on primary and eventually secondary education fall as numbers decline, reskilling or upskilling the working population isn't free or even cheap but may be deemed important to promote economic growth on the basis a better skilled workforce is more productive.
And structurally, the amounts spent on pensions and healthcare are only going to increase in real terms as the population ages.
We can do a few things to reduce the speed of that increase - abolishing the triple lock, making the NHS more efficient - but it's not conceivable that spending can be cut.
Even proposals on the right (introducing an insurance element of the NHS, or partial privatisation) is fundamentally shifting from tax to mandatory insurance premiums. Which I'd argue are fungible for most people.
Didn’t read much about that in the report.
(And some goes to people who are not formally unemployed, because they can't work, presumably, so don't show up on the unemployment stats. Edit: 'disabled' in the small print again.)
So only some of it goes to the true unemployed.
This gets interesting.
For example, he suggests the reports says, "civil servants all wonderful". The obvious counter-example is Chris Whitty, who must have had an uncomfortable time reading the report (e.g. para. 3.104).
That the government made no attempt to encourage people to improve their health and fitness during covid was reprehensible.
https://bsky.app/profile/chriso-wiki.bsky.social/post/3m644etznxa2k
Face masks, for example, greatly lower the transmission rate for any respiratory virus.
Compared with even the shortest lockdown, they are a minor imposition - and in some countries just ordinary practice.
Better ventilation has similar health benefits for relatively minor costs.
The other lesson which ought to be learned was the benefit of cheap rapid tests for infection, once developed.
We wasted tens of billions on PCR 'gold standard' testing which was almost completely ineffective in changing outcomes.
Cheap self-administered tests, widely adopted, could completely avoid the need for any lockdown in the future (and could have been far better used earlier in this pandemic).
I haven't read the report, but if it hasn't adopted a cost/benefit analysis as its fundamental framework, then it is a waste of time.
(Apart from the necessary conformation of what a crap PM was Boris - though we didn't need to spend £200m to know that.)
1. Healthcare: spending will only increase over time in real terms whether public or privately. All we can do is slow the speed or increase.
2. Working age benefits. I'd be interested to see a breakdown of this spending. I expect it's where the Tories/Reform will ultimately cut from, but easier said than done.
3. Pensions. As above, rising pension age and scrapping triple lock only slow the speed of increase. Means testing arguably breaks a long-standing social contact.
4. Education. I'm amazed at how efficient many schools are already. Reduced birth rate may reduce costs slightly in long-term but marginal.
5. Debt interest. Not in our control: need to cut elsewhere or raise taxes to reduce this.
6. Defence spending: will be increasing over time.
... And that's before we get to the woefully underfunded courts and social care.
Who would want to be in government?
Voters underestimate the amount spent on pensioners though which suggests the pensioner vote is still reluctant to face cuts to its pensions and benefits.
The lack of emphasis on ventilation was another mystery.
Fortunately I was driving in the expectation of being surprised.
Ireland is resolutely neutral and has refused to provide any lethal equipment to Ukraine. It could afford to spend a lot of money paying for Ukraine to manufacture its own weapons, or buying them from the Americans for Ukraine, but its notions of neutrality are more important than its resolve to help defend a fellow European country from Imperial aggression.
The dishonesty, naivety and complacency in Ireland's position on Ukraine is maddening.
Reality on government spending makes England's batting look dull and predictable.
Rational voting is not about depth of accounting knowledge, or knowing what building a motorway costs compared with overseas aid etc.
It lies firstly in the majority understanding that our society, post WWII and only now breaking down, depends OTOH on wealth creation and OTOH on having a population with health, education, pensions and safety nets, employability, rule of law, housing and transport. This naturally leads to the centrism often called social democracy.
We vote, in totality, for the government which seems able to do this best, and also with the bias of self interest in mind. How this breaks down in accounting terms is mostly a matter for them not us.
The current system breakdown is based neither on public ignorance nor a big change in the desire for post WWII social democrat continuity; it is based on a lack of belief (including about Reform) that any of them are very good at doing this, and a lack of belief that there is a better system than the prevailing consensus.
We continue, rationally, not to vote for truly alternative leftism, nor for small state libertarians.
If a party policy was sold as ‘we’ll cut immigration to zero but you’re going to be a tenner a week worse off’ I think it would be both wildly popular and people voting to make themselves poorer
It's not entirely clear whether the Epstein connection is largely a result of the Epstein/Bannon connection, or a more direct one.
Epstein was, of course, heavily involved in Russian money laundering.
Edit: Ah, I just read the tweet that started this thread. I agree, that is appaling.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/live/crl5jn5d84kt#LiveReporting