Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
More likely the who takes over from Keir in 2028 or so, by which time Ed has probably missed the boat. But yes- a new leader bounce and a bit of feelgood fairy dust and the job's a goodun.
As for Ed's popularity, it's not a mystery. He's got an agenda, he's got the Whitehall experience to push it through, and he's confident in a way that 2015 Ed wasn't. And if it annoys the other lot, so much the better.
It probably helps that his in-tray contained some easy wins in projects that the last lot had sat on, rather than the last-minute turds that many of the incoming team were bequeathed.
Starmer will go in 2026 not 2028, the 3/1 on offer for it being between July and September looked good value (if it's still available.)
Expectations of the budget are so low that Labour will see a minor recovery in the polls when it is all done and dusted. Despite all the bluster from the right wing press, there is still plenty of scope there for Labour to improve the living standards of those at the lower end of the income scale while confining the economic pain to those at the top end of the income and wealth scale. Mansion tax, higher rate pension contributions relief, CGT loopholes, freezing income tax thresholds only at the higher rates, etc etc. There is still scope for a few surprises.
If Labour gets back to polling in the low 20s as a consequence it will be enough to tide Starmer and Reeves over until May, but immediately after that a leadership challenge will still be almost inevitable in the wake of still lousy local and devolved election results, which will serve as a catalyst for a challenge.
Regarding Miliband, having tipped him here at 20/1 recently, I think it's realistically between him, Rayner and Streeting. All are in with a decent chance at this stage.
Given polls have a swing from SNP to Labour since 2021 in Scotland still, given Labour will still likely win in London and the big city local elections even if some losses to the Greens (perhaps reduced due to a tax the rich budget) and given Labour still likely stay in power in Wales at least as junior partner to Plaid their losses may not be too bad in May
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
We have; we've learned that the type of social and cultural change that we've had since Brexit has turned out rather different from that many people were clearly expecting....
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
Classic Roger.
Is that good or bad? My skill set was telling a convincing story in 30 secs which is about twice the attention span of your average voter looking at Ashcrofts polls!
Translated into I do not like Lord Ashcroft polling
Did everyone see that car crash Sky interview where the interviewer laughed at him.
Only a true idiot could be skewered like that, and instead of getting out of it with a mealy mouthed acknowledgement, decide to grind himself further on to the stake with dogged determination.
Apologies for using the Tory Party short, but you really don't want to see the full thing anyway.
I guess Ed Miliband doubled down because he's basically correct. This is a tax on profits, not on prices which are set internationally. It's highly disingenuous of the Conservatives to castigate Ed Miliband for a levy that they put in place.
You do realise that heavily taxing profits reduces investment and supply, don't you?
Not when there is a 91% tax allowance for investment and supply. The current tax system massively incentivises diverting profit into new production.
If you supertax profits to that extent energy companies simply won't bother and you'll be reliant on imports, pushing up costs.
Read my post again.
I have. It's very far from the slam dunk point you seem to think it is.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
The government we had was a car crash. In fact, just the start of a multiple car pile up.
Re the EU, it's an interesting one... Would it have become more of an issue or would it have stayed as a marginal thing, particularly if a Miliband-led government actually fixed some of our structural issues (don't laugh!*). Before the 2015 election, the referendum promise ws a way to shoot UKIP's fox on the right and was, perhaps, important in the Con party win**. But it wasn't a very high priority issue for most people. It became so during the campaign, but - mostly - after the vote. I knew plenty of people who weren't very engaged in the question even during the campaign (we were obviously going to vote remain) who became rabid Europhiles or, more rarely, rabid Eurosceptics, post vote.
*FWIW I think 2015 Miliband would have triangulated like crazy, made Starmer look dynamic and decisive and achieved f-all. He's a different guy now, no longer cares so much about what people think and has the courage to pursue his convictions, for good or ill **Although this, more than anything else, lost my vote as I saw it as a pointless distraction that would cost growth due to a bit of uncertainty. I voted Lab without a great deal of enthusiasm mainly over this. I wonder how many others felt similar - fewer than the gained UKIP voters? Quite possibly, but non-zero.
Not sure he'd have been worse than Starmer on triangulation but the Glasman "Blue" Labour influence was strong under Milliband as well, so it seems quite likely they'd have made similar mistakes. Everything else being equal then a Milliband govt would have run to 2019/20 and even if a pro-Brexit govt is then elected it runs into Covid before a Brexit referendum. I'd say that makes a vote for Brexit less likely but it's an "all bets are off" situation.
Did everyone see that car crash Sky interview where the interviewer laughed at him.
Only a true idiot could be skewered like that, and instead of getting out of it with a mealy mouthed acknowledgement, decide to grind himself further on to the stake with dogged determination.
Apologies for using the Tory Party short, but you really don't want to see the full thing anyway.
I guess Ed Miliband doubled down because he's basically correct. This is a tax on profits, not on prices which are set internationally. It's highly disingenuous of the Conservatives to castigate Ed Miliband for a levy that they put in place.
But if you are looking at a certain return on your investment then you look at that net of the tax. If you are aiming for 20% but 78% of your profit is being nicked in tax then you need to charge higher prices to achieve that 20%. The slightly scary thing about that interview is that I think Miliband was simply not getting that, that he will not accept that there are consequences of his actions.
Just like when we had the windfall taxes and then lamented the lack of new investment. Who'd have thought?
I think there is an element of win some, lose some. Oil companies should get reasonable upsides to compensate for periods of poor returns. So it's a judgement I think when you are really in a period of taxable windfalls.
The interviewer completely missed the point on pricing, so I don't think we can conclude from the interview that Miliband doesn't "get it" on the actual point, when he explained correctly.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
That was Boris. And he paid the political price.
Being able to make your own decisions doesn't mean you'll always make good ones.
Anyway, Farage has unveiled a few things recently.
A black Reform UK shirt. A gold party badge with the arrow pointing at 18.
Next up: a black leather sash across the chest and thigh length black leather boots.
Spode is back
The Spode vase strategy rather than the Ming vase, fine robust English crockery that’ll take a lot of punishment.
Thigh length boots?
Does this mean waders or something a bit more…. Caberet?
Also, the Sam Browne should be… brown
One time I was walking back from riding lesson, down Cornmarket Street, in Oxford. Nice sunny morning. I realised I was getting some interesting looks.
Mainly because I was still wearing my long (black) riding boots. With black riding jeans. And was wearing a black shirt.
I hadn’t coordinated the shirt with the jeans - just grabbed something out of the wardrobe…
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
We have; we've learned that the type of social and cultural change that we've had since Brexit has turned out rather different from that many people were clearly expecting....
This thread and it's plethora of James O'Briens is making me nostalgic.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
Very well said. And within that there is plenty of scope for agreement with many of those who generally are wary or oppose immigration, on issues like fairness, integration and skills. If we focused on those plus housing and infrastructure the salience of the issue would be far less.
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
Classic Roger.
Is that good or bad? My skill set was telling a convincing story in 30 secs which is about twice the attention span of your average voter looking at Ashcrofts polls!
Translated into I do not like Lord Ashcroft polling
It (the original point - nico67's) is valid though. SKSICIPM, but there seems to be a majority view that NFWBECIPM (Nigel Farage Would Be Even Crapper if PM).
When you have eliminated all that are impossible, then whoever remains, however unsuitable, must be the PM
All that's needed to sink Starmer is for someone else possible (in the minds of most of the electorate) to emerge.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
I love hotels with libraries where you can pick a random book from the shelf and settle down on a comfy armchair with a crackling fire and a glass of whisky.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
Did everyone see that car crash Sky interview where the interviewer laughed at him.
Only a true idiot could be skewered like that, and instead of getting out of it with a mealy mouthed acknowledgement, decide to grind himself further on to the stake with dogged determination.
Apologies for using the Tory Party short, but you really don't want to see the full thing anyway.
I guess Ed Miliband doubled down because he's basically correct. This is a tax on profits, not on prices which are set internationally. It's highly disingenuous of the Conservatives to castigate Ed Miliband for a levy that they put in place.
But if you are looking at a certain return on your investment then you look at that net of the tax. If you are aiming for 20% but 78% of your profit is being nicked in tax then you need to charge higher prices to achieve that 20%. The slightly scary thing about that interview is that I think Miliband was simply not getting that, that he will not accept that there are consequences of his actions.
Just like when we had the windfall taxes and then lamented the lack of new investment. Who'd have thought?
You can't charge a higher price in the oil market, it's one of the few examples of a perfect market, producers are price-takers unless they band together like OPEC but even then they are shifting the market price not achieving individual price differentiation. If the cost (in this case tax) is higher in one country where they produce then they make a lower profit on oil production in that country and that will influence their decisions on investment etc but it will make no difference to the market price of oil.
Milliband does get the economics of the energy market and he is trying to use those to achieve his aims. People don't necessarily like those aims, particularly oil executives with a personal bonus incentive, and they have money to lobby against them but Milliband doesn't want new oil & gas in the North Sea, he wants the energy companies to switch to renewable energy production.
Let me try and give a worked example. If you are a supermarket and you want to sell petrol then obviously your base cost is fixed by the price of petrol in the international market, I am not disputing that. Let's say you want to buy £1m of fuel. That is what you pay. But that is only 1 element of the charge made to the public. They also have their distribution and servicing costs. Let's say that they amount to 20%. That means your cost in providing that £1m of fuel is £1.2m. Let's say you want to make a gross 20% return on that fuel. You would then be looking to charge £1.44m to get your gross profit.
But if you are looking at your net profit after tax you have to compare the profit on selling fuel with the cost of selling washing powder. On the washing powder you pay 25% tax on your gross profit. On the fuel you pay 78%. So, to make the same net profit you need to make roughly 3x the gross profit that you do on the washing powder. So you charge your customers more.
Of course if for whatever reason the supermarket was selling on the international wholesale market they wouldn't get away with that. The market simply would not pay the higher premium. But Joe Public in the domestic market does not have that option. So they pay more to each of the suppliers available in their area, all of whom have the same problem. So the level of taxation does affect the price that the consumer pays.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
The government we had was a car crash. In fact, just the start of a multiple car pile up.
Re the EU, it's an interesting one... Would it have become more of an issue or would it have stayed as a marginal thing, particularly if a Miliband-led government actually fixed some of our structural issues (don't laugh!*). Before the 2015 election, the referendum promise ws a way to shoot UKIP's fox on the right and was, perhaps, important in the Con party win**. But it wasn't a very high priority issue for most people. It became so during the campaign, but - mostly - after the vote. I knew plenty of people who weren't very engaged in the question even during the campaign (we were obviously going to vote remain) who became rabid Europhiles or, more rarely, rabid Eurosceptics, post vote.
*FWIW I think 2015 Miliband would have triangulated like crazy, made Starmer look dynamic and decisive and achieved f-all. He's a different guy now, no longer cares so much about what people think and has the courage to pursue his convictions, for good or ill **Although this, more than anything else, lost my vote as I saw it as a pointless distraction that would cost growth due to a bit of uncertainty. I voted Lab without a great deal of enthusiasm mainly over this. I wonder how many others felt similar - fewer than the gained UKIP voters? Quite possibly, but non-zero.
Not sure he'd have been worse than Starmer on triangulation but the Glasman "Blue" Labour influence was strong under Milliband as well, so it seems quite likely they'd have made similar mistakes. Everything else being equal then a Milliband govt would have run to 2019/20 and even if a pro-Brexit govt is then elected it runs into Covid before a Brexit referendum. I'd say that makes a vote for Brexit less likely but it's an "all bets are off" situation.
Yes, a bit mean on Ed to say he'd be worse than Starmer on that. He would have had actual ideas, I think, which would have been something. Even if he didn't have the political ability to sell them.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Good luck running an economy without immigration, an ageing population and the Conservative party ideology of never increasing taxes.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
Correct. By happy chance Brexit and the Brexiteers are now being blamed for everything. It's becoming evermore the reason for all government failings. From rubber boats to wars to financial decline. (ref Newsnight last night) It seems surprising that the government don't make more of it knowing that all the Brexiteers from foot soldiers to leaders are all squashed together on the opposition benches I can only think they're saving it for the big push next year or the year after
(Though tbf, Ken is a fairly decent cultural critic himself - I quite enjoyed some of his jazz programmes for the Beeb.)
Infamous swordsman Alan Clark's trilby wearing father was of course TV historian Kenneth. Obvs. before he reinvented himself as a jazz critic and added an e to his name.
The Guardian now says: a man in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark)
Tbh I cannot recall any of the three wearing a trilby.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Not have you. The polling, however, is more on my side than yours, with Brexit being almost as unpopular as Starmer.
Even if a huge majority of voters were keen to rejoin the EU, it is an extremely costly project. At a time when we should be asking, what can government stop spending money on?, it would be surprising if the answer is Spend a whole lot more on another project.
The damage being done to our GDP by Brexit has been, and remains, significant. So, even attempting to stop the bleeding would help confidence and probably pay for itself. Meanwhile, the Russian kompromat on the Brexit side will most likely weaken the Faragist gang significantly- even more so if Putin were to fall and all the plots they hatched in Moscow were to become public- so we should not be afraid of the far right fuss. Although I agree rejoining is not an immediate prospect, taking steps now to sort out some short run deals, with a view that we will realign more closely over a time line of several years and rejoin a version of the European project within a decade, is clearly worth doing.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
This becomes arcane, but there is an error in your argument. Brexit gave us the opportunity to join EFTA/EEA in a Norway style deal. It is not true that no government ever wanted it. Norway had and has a government. We would then be in an economic but not political union, along with that basket case Norway. IMHO we start doing it right now, just 9 years too late.
(Though tbf, Ken is a fairly decent cultural critic himself - I quite enjoyed some of his jazz programmes for the Beeb.)
Infamous swordsman Alan Clark's trilby wearing father was of course TV historian Kenneth. Obvs. before he reinvented himself as a jazz critic and added an e to his name.
The Guardian now says: a man in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark)
Tbh I cannot recall any of the three wearing a trilby.
Cover of K. Clark's biography; trilby, homburg, hard to tell. I imagine this image was in the reviewer's mind.
The depressing thing in that article is nearly all (think bar one) of the desired budget changes are simply based on their very short term personal circumstances - i.e. I'm about to buy a house lets cut stamp duty. The people interviewed are not thinking at all about what is best for the economy or society.
We encourage politicians to give too much weight to such views.
(Though tbf, Ken is a fairly decent cultural critic himself - I quite enjoyed some of his jazz programmes for the Beeb.)
Infamous swordsman Alan Clark's trilby wearing father was of course TV historian Kenneth. Obvs. before he reinvented himself as a jazz critic and added an e to his name.
The Guardian now says: a man in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark)
Tbh I cannot recall any of the three wearing a trilby.
Cover of K. Clark's biography; trilby, homburg, hard to tell. I imagine this image was in the reviewer's mind.
Now obviously the proof is in the pudding, but if he can reform the domestic nuclear industry that will count in his favour.
Currently the UK has some of the world’s most expensive domestic and commercial energy, and there’s a very clear link between low energy prices and economic growth.
While the report is notably good, and unusually, for something so sensible, has been welcomed by the government, it's unlikely to make much difference to electricity prices this decade.
Indeed these things take time, but businesses plan for the medium and long term so it’s good to see government at least signalling that they wish to move to lower energy prices, which is a welcome departure from Miliband’s usual rhetoric about carbon targets being a higher priority than cheap energy.
You are easily taken in , only an idiotic fool would believe that crap. The man is a moron.
I imagine the propsect of Ed Milliband as Prime Minister will have everyone reaching for photos of a man and a bacon sandwich - no less amusing than a future Prime Minister stuck on a zip wire like a human pinata.
How often has the former leader of an Opposition party become Prime Minister? I'm struggling to think of an example - it would be analogous to Hague or IDS doing the same from the Conservative side? That's why I think it's as improbable as Boris Johnson returning - parties shouldn't look back or go back like football clubs re-hiring a previously sacked manager.
As for Starmer, there's no vacancy until he wants to go and he's only been PM for less than 18 months so I simply can't see it for all the wishful thinking on here. I don't rule out a successful re-election in 2029 and him standing down a couple of years later - yes, anyone who thinks the 2029 election is done and dusted for any party at this time is mad (or bad or even sad depending on the time of day when posting on here).
We've seen polling volatility before and while some think it will settle to a straight Reform vs Labour match up as the election approaches (and that would be the percentage call), that's far from guaranteed and we might well go in to the next election campaign with five parties between 15% and 25% (who knows?).
The failure of Your Party (thus far) suggests six parties in a five party system designed for two main parties doesn't work.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
Except when we are being flooded by spongers and ne'er do wells.
The item feels like a parody. Quite close to how Private Eye would depict the BBC at its most bland. 'How can I make it to Glyndebourne on £150K without my Motability Jaguar?'
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
More likely the who takes over from Keir in 2028 or so, by which time Ed has probably missed the boat. But yes- a new leader bounce and a bit of feelgood fairy dust and the job's a goodun.
As for Ed's popularity, it's not a mystery. He's got an agenda, he's got the Whitehall experience to push it through, and he's confident in a way that 2015 Ed wasn't. And if it annoys the other lot, so much the better.
It probably helps that his in-tray contained some easy wins in projects that the last lot had sat on, rather than the last-minute turds that many of the incoming team were bequeathed.
Starmer will go in 2026 not 2028, the 3/1 on offer for it being between July and September looked good value (if it's still available.)
Expectations of the budget are so low that Labour will see a minor recovery in the polls when it is all done and dusted. Despite all the bluster from the right wing press, there is still plenty of scope there for Labour to improve the living standards of those at the lower end of the income scale while confining the economic pain to those at the top end of the income and wealth scale. Mansion tax, higher rate pension contributions relief, CGT loopholes, freezing income tax thresholds only at the higher rates, etc etc. There is still scope for a few surprises.
If Labour gets back to polling in the low 20s as a consequence it will be enough to tide Starmer and Reeves over until May, but immediately after that a leadership challenge will still be almost inevitable in the wake of still lousy local and devolved election results, which will serve as a catalyst for a challenge.
Regarding Miliband, having tipped him here at 20/1 recently, I think it's realistically between him, Rayner and Streeting. All are in with a decent chance at this stage.
Shows how dire the situation is for Labour , they manage to make the Tories electable.
Did everyone see that car crash Sky interview where the interviewer laughed at him.
Only a true idiot could be skewered like that, and instead of getting out of it with a mealy mouthed acknowledgement, decide to grind himself further on to the stake with dogged determination.
Apologies for using the Tory Party short, but you really don't want to see the full thing anyway.
I guess Ed Miliband doubled down because he's basically correct. This is a tax on profits, not on prices which are set internationally. It's highly disingenuous of the Conservatives to castigate Ed Miliband for a levy that they put in place.
But if you are looking at a certain return on your investment then you look at that net of the tax. If you are aiming for 20% but 78% of your profit is being nicked in tax then you need to charge higher prices to achieve that 20%. The slightly scary thing about that interview is that I think Miliband was simply not getting that, that he will not accept that there are consequences of his actions.
Just like when we had the windfall taxes and then lamented the lack of new investment. Who'd have thought?
You can't charge a higher price in the oil market, it's one of the few examples of a perfect market, producers are price-takers unless they band together like OPEC but even then they are shifting the market price not achieving individual price differentiation. If the cost (in this case tax) is higher in one country where they produce then they make a lower profit on oil production in that country and that will influence their decisions on investment etc but it will make no difference to the market price of oil.
Milliband does get the economics of the energy market and he is trying to use those to achieve his aims. People don't necessarily like those aims, particularly oil executives with a personal bonus incentive, and they have money to lobby against them but Milliband doesn't want new oil & gas in the North Sea, he wants the energy companies to switch to renewable energy production.
Let me try and give a worked example. If you are a supermarket and you want to sell petrol then obviously your base cost is fixed by the price of petrol in the international market, I am not disputing that. Let's say you want to buy £1m of fuel. That is what you pay. But that is only 1 element of the charge made to the public. They also have their distribution and servicing costs. Let's say that they amount to 20%. That means your cost in providing that £1m of fuel is £1.2m. Let's say you want to make a gross 20% return on that fuel. You would then be looking to charge £1.44m to get your gross profit.
But if you are looking at your net profit after tax you have to compare the profit on selling fuel with the cost of selling washing powder. On the washing powder you pay 25% tax on your gross profit. On the fuel you pay 78%. So, to make the same net profit you need to make roughly 3x the gross profit that you do on the washing powder. So you charge your customers more.
Of course if for whatever reason the supermarket was selling on the international wholesale market they wouldn't get away with that. The market simply would not pay the higher premium. But Joe Public in the domestic market does not have that option. So they pay more to each of the suppliers available in their area, all of whom have the same problem. So the level of taxation does affect the price that the consumer pays.
So the errors in your example are as follows:
1) The 78% is paid on the profit made by selling the oil on the international market, the supermarket is downstream of that it doesn't pay 78% tax on petrol sales. 2) Supermarkets do not aim to make the same margin on every product, they aim to maximise overall profit, you may have encountered the term "loss leader" for example? 3) The cost to the UK consumer compared to consumers in other countries is determined by UK supply costs and taxes on oil and gas after it has been purchased on the global market.
The 78% windfall tax is applied to the profits made on production.
Now obviously the proof is in the pudding, but if he can reform the domestic nuclear industry that will count in his favour.
Currently the UK has some of the world’s most expensive domestic and commercial energy, and there’s a very clear link between low energy prices and economic growth.
While the report is notably good, and unusually, for something so sensible, has been welcomed by the government, it's unlikely to make much difference to electricity prices this decade.
Indeed these things take time, but businesses plan for the medium and long term so it’s good to see government at least signalling that they wish to move to lower energy prices, which is a welcome departure from Miliband’s usual rhetoric about carbon targets being a higher priority than cheap energy.
You are easily taken in , only an idiotic fool would believe that crap. The man is a moron.
On 99% of what he says I agree entirely. But if he surprises on the upside occasionally he deserves credit.
I like to be an optimist, there’s very few bad people around once we get past the Vladimir Putins, although there’s plenty of politicians with bad ideas.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
Clearly the country want noneoftheabove. I don't blame them.
Well, your moniker would suggest that to be the case but tell me, as I'm always fascinated by those who take that vioew, what DO you want? Every time I challenge anyone who says "they're all the same" or "I wouldn't vote for any of them" to tell me what they do want or what they would support, I usually get a torrent of incoherent inconsistent blustering.
Anyway, Farage has unveiled a few things recently.
A black Reform UK shirt. A gold party badge with the arrow pointing at 18.
Next up: a black leather sash across the chest and thigh length black leather boots.
Spode is back
The Spode vase strategy rather than the Ming vase, fine robust English crockery that’ll take a lot of punishment.
Thigh length boots?
Does this mean waders or something a bit more…. Caberet?
Also, the Sam Browne should be… brown
One time I was walking back from riding lesson, down Cornmarket Street, in Oxford. Nice sunny morning. I realised I was getting some interesting looks.
Mainly because I was still wearing my long (black) riding boots. With black riding jeans. And was wearing a black shirt.
I hadn’t coordinated the shirt with the jeans - just grabbed something out of the wardrobe…
Just as well that you didn't grab your leather greatcoat, too.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
Election Maps UK tweeted it referencing @YouGov, but there doesn't seem to be a YouGov tweet. The Wiki editor has added it without data tables. It may have been published by Sky or the Times.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
Clearly the country want noneoftheabove. I don't blame them.
Well, your moniker would suggest that to be the case but tell me, as I'm always fascinated by those who take that vioew, what DO you want? Every time I challenge anyone who says "they're all the same" or "I wouldn't vote for any of them" to tell me what they do want or what they would support, I usually get a torrent of incoherent inconsistent blustering.
We are nowhere near a coherent group but what I think is the best course for the country is essentially a massive increase in investment, less ideological thinking and a rebalancing of the economy and taxation from asset owners to workers.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
Anyway, Farage has unveiled a few things recently.
A black Reform UK shirt. A gold party badge with the arrow pointing at 18.
Next up: a black leather sash across the chest and thigh length black leather boots.
Spode is back
The Spode vase strategy rather than the Ming vase, fine robust English crockery that’ll take a lot of punishment.
Thigh length boots?
Does this mean waders or something a bit more…. Caberet?
Also, the Sam Browne should be… brown
One time I was walking back from riding lesson, down Cornmarket Street, in Oxford. Nice sunny morning. I realised I was getting some interesting looks.
Mainly because I was still wearing my long (black) riding boots. With black riding jeans. And was wearing a black shirt.
I hadn’t coordinated the shirt with the jeans - just grabbed something out of the wardrobe…
Just as well that you didn't grab your leather greatcoat, too.
On topic - there is something curious about the reaction to Miliband. As demonstrated in this thread, most of the policies that he is castigated for are actually just Conservative policies that have carried over into this administration. The route to Net Zero is indistinguishable from that from the prior government.
This isn't a good thing. If you're going to cause this level of aggravation then you might as well actually do something interesting - e.g. boost growth with regional pricing, or bin pernicious standard charges. I think Miliband is similar to Starmer/Reeves in this respect, just with a better social media operation. That might be enough to win the leadership, but it's not going to be enough to rescue the government - I don't think there will be a big push to topple Starmer until such a character appears.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Anyway, Farage has unveiled a few things recently.
A black Reform UK shirt. A gold party badge with the arrow pointing at 18.
Next up: a black leather sash across the chest and thigh length black leather boots.
Spode is back
The Spode vase strategy rather than the Ming vase, fine robust English crockery that’ll take a lot of punishment.
Thigh length boots?
Does this mean waders or something a bit more…. Caberet?
Also, the Sam Browne should be… brown
One time I was walking back from riding lesson, down Cornmarket Street, in Oxford. Nice sunny morning. I realised I was getting some interesting looks.
Mainly because I was still wearing my long (black) riding boots. With black riding jeans. And was wearing a black shirt.
I hadn’t coordinated the shirt with the jeans - just grabbed something out of the wardrobe…
You hinting that it was not your dashingly handsome good looks and fantastic physique they were gasping at there Malmesbury
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
I love hotels with libraries where you can pick a random book from the shelf and settle down on a comfy armchair with a crackling fire and a glass of whisky.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
I love hotels with libraries where you can pick a random book from the shelf and settle down on a comfy armchair with a crackling fire and a glass of whisky.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
I recommend the George Hotel, Inveraray. One of their suites is called The Library. It has a wall of books, an open fire and comfy armchairs. The extensive selection of whisky is found in the bar.
And I'd like a nice ribeye steak for my dinner tonight so we're all going to be disappointed.
This is the problem politicians of all parties face - human nature (or greed if you prefer). Everyone wants more and expects the other guy to pay for it. That's a failure of our political education over a 40 or 50 year period - I'd argue. If you try to tell people the truth and particularly if it's unpleasant, they don't want to hear it and your opponents will decry you for telling bad news.
Now obviously the proof is in the pudding, but if he can reform the domestic nuclear industry that will count in his favour.
Currently the UK has some of the world’s most expensive domestic and commercial energy, and there’s a very clear link between low energy prices and economic growth.
While the report is notably good, and unusually, for something so sensible, has been welcomed by the government, it's unlikely to make much difference to electricity prices this decade.
Indeed these things take time, but businesses plan for the medium and long term so it’s good to see government at least signalling that they wish to move to lower energy prices, which is a welcome departure from Miliband’s usual rhetoric about carbon targets being a higher priority than cheap energy.
You are easily taken in , only an idiotic fool would believe that crap. The man is a moron.
On 99% of what he says I agree entirely. But if he surprises on the upside occasionally he deserves credit.
I like to be an optimist, there’s very few bad people around once we get past the Vladimir Putins, although there’s plenty of politicians with bad ideas.
Milliband has never had a good idea in his cream puff, he is a clown
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
This becomes arcane, but there is an error in your argument. Brexit gave us the opportunity to join EFTA/EEA in a Norway style deal. It is not true that no government ever wanted it. Norway had and has a government. We would then be in an economic but not political union, along with that basket case Norway. IMHO we start doing it right now, just 9 years too late.
I challenge that. I don't think EEA is the panacea supporters make it out to be.
Brexit has turned out the way I expected it to because people behaved in the way I expected them to. So naturally I claim after the fact that people acted rationally. The tyre hitting the road is that no-one has offered the UK a place in EEA and no UK government has explored the possibility of joining. When we left the club, we left behind the benefits.
We are where we are, could we join the EEA to limit the damage of Brexit? I am very much up for damage limitation so it is worth exploring. We would get a second class membership with many, but not all, of the benefits, and very little say in what they are. Do we want less say over things that affect us than we had as EU members? Maybe it's OK - this is damage limitation. Will the other countries agree to it? Subject to difficult and uncomfortable negotiations. Should we just go for the real thing?
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
Classic Roger.
Is that good or bad? My skill set was telling a convincing story in 30 secs which is about twice the attention span of your average voter looking at Ashcrofts polls!
Translated into I do not like Lord Ashcroft polling
On the contrary. I thought it one of the most instructive polls i've seen lately. Though not all through a simple reading of the numbers
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
Clearly the country want noneoftheabove. I don't blame them.
Well, your moniker would suggest that to be the case but tell me, as I'm always fascinated by those who take that vioew, what DO you want? Every time I challenge anyone who says "they're all the same" or "I wouldn't vote for any of them" to tell me what they do want or what they would support, I usually get a torrent of incoherent inconsistent blustering.
We are nowhere near a coherent group but what I think is the best course for the country is essentially a massive increase in investment, less ideological thinking and a rebalancing of the economy and taxation from asset owners to workers.
Okay, there's a lot of sense in that. I'm not quite sure how the investment is funded other than through more borrowing and while I'd welcome "less ideological thinking", I'm not sure about Butskellism for the 21st Century looks like? Could we call it "Starnochism"?
The Devil is in the detail, are you advocating, for example, tax cuts for working people (many pensioners and non workers also pay tax) and significant property asset taxation (workers tend to live in houses and flats as well)?
I've argued for Land Value Taxation whose time has come.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
I love hotels with libraries where you can pick a random book from the shelf and settle down on a comfy armchair with a crackling fire and a glass of whisky.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
I love hotels with libraries where you can pick a random book from the shelf and settle down on a comfy armchair with a crackling fire and a glass of whisky.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
I recommend the George Hotel, Inveraray. One of their suites is called The Library. It has a wall of books, an open fire and comfy armchairs. The extensive selection of whisky is found in the bar.
Sounds like my kind of place! Inveraray is a lovely town in a beautiful part of Scotland.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
A pity, as SK Tremayne writes remarkably good fantasy.
The problems begin when he starts passing his fantasies off as facts, a la Dan Brown.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
This becomes arcane, but there is an error in your argument. Brexit gave us the opportunity to join EFTA/EEA in a Norway style deal. It is not true that no government ever wanted it. Norway had and has a government. We would then be in an economic but not political union, along with that basket case Norway. IMHO we start doing it right now, just 9 years too late.
I challenge that. I don't think EEA is the panacea supporters make it out to be.
Brexit has turned out the way I expected it to because people behaved in the way I expected them to. So naturally I claim after the fact that people acted rationally. The tyre hitting the road is that no-one has offered the UK a place in EEA and no UK government has explored the possibility of joining. When we left the club, we left behind the benefits.
We are where we are, could we join the EEA to limit the damage of Brexit? I am very much up for damage limitation so it is worth exploring. We would get a second class membership with many, but not all, of the benefits, and very little say in what they are. Do we want less say over things that affect us than we had as EU members? Maybe it's OK - this is damage limitation. Will the other countries agree to it? Subject to difficult and uncomfortable negotiations. Should we just go for the real thing?
These are all old and pointless arguments. We all know we won’t join the EU because of Schengen and the Euro, and we all know the EEA isn’t quite right for a country of our size. Spending the next 10-20 years arguing which bits to pay for access to is a distraction when the real systemic issues we face have nothing to do with Brexit and are about productivity and investment. Even if we had never left, we’d still be in no better place than France economically, and more or less where we are now. Though a Reform landslide (and resultant catastrophe) would be marginally more likely as Farage blamed everything on the EU. So in that respect we are much better off.
I imagine the propsect of Ed Milliband as Prime Minister will have everyone reaching for photos of a man and a bacon sandwich - no less amusing than a future Prime Minister stuck on a zip wire like a human pinata.
How often has the former leader of an Opposition party become Prime Minister? I'm struggling to think of an example - it would be analogous to Hague or IDS doing the same from the Conservative side?
Earl Grey in 1830.
Earl Russell in 1865.
Gladstone in 1880.
Bonar Law in 1922.
Ramsay Macdonald in 1924, depending on your definition of 'former leader of an opposition party' as the Labour leadership system was peculiar at the time.
Those are the only examples to hold office since 1832, and it is worth noting that two of them (Russell and Gladstone) were former Prime Ministers.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from skilled migration.
We ought to be able to attract the best and brightest to boost our skills, complementing our skills from education.
If you look around the world the most successful economies, per capita, are those that encourage skilled migration. For the same reason as we have universal education, because having a skilled population boosts us all.
For some reason the UK has become hooked on unproductive, low skilled, migration. To fill unproductive, minimum wage jobs or cash in hand jobs. That just devalues our education, it doesn't supplement and boost it.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
That was Boris. And he paid the political price.
Being able to make your own decisions doesn't mean you'll always make good ones.
It wasn't just Boris who paid the political price: it was the entire Conservative Party. The Tories may never win another general election in the country. I think that means they've gotta win the prize for learning nothing.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
Clearly the country want noneoftheabove. I don't blame them.
Well, your moniker would suggest that to be the case but tell me, as I'm always fascinated by those who take that vioew, what DO you want? Every time I challenge anyone who says "they're all the same" or "I wouldn't vote for any of them" to tell me what they do want or what they would support, I usually get a torrent of incoherent inconsistent blustering.
We are nowhere near a coherent group but what I think is the best course for the country is essentially a massive increase in investment, less ideological thinking and a rebalancing of the economy and taxation from asset owners to workers.
Okay, there's a lot of sense in that. I'm not quite sure how the investment is funded other than through more borrowing and while I'd welcome "less ideological thinking", I'm not sure about Butskellism for the 21st Century looks like? Could we call it "Starnochism"?
The Devil is in the detail, are you advocating, for example, tax cuts for working people (many pensioners and non workers also pay tax) and significant property asset taxation (workers tend to live in houses and flats as well)?
I've argued for Land Value Taxation whose time has come.
We need tax rises not cuts, although some tax redistribution is possible. Merging NI and IT is an obvious one that does a bit of both. Some sort of land tax to replace existing property taxes would also be an improvement.
The tax take needs to stay high for probably a decade or so to get the investment going, but it should be done with a view to lowering it back in the future as we start to see the benefits of such investment.
Mass house building is the easiest way to transfer wealth back to workers after the 15 years of QE and asset inflation.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
World income is grossly distorted - arguably by far the largest example of inequality on the planet. That makes migration a natural choice for the energetic (the lazy will just put up with whatever is available locally). That's independent of what is in the interest of the receiving country or the country that they're leaving (after all, the former country is losing its most energetic people), and it's possible that mass migration is in the interest of the majority of the migrants - who only have one life, after all - but not always of the recipient countries. One reason I favour substantial foreign aid (0.7% of GDP should be a minimum, not an abandoned maximum, and looking after migrants shouldn't be part of it) is to make massive migration less appealing.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
The biggest bias of the BBC (and I am a lifelong fan) is that it tries to convince us that news and current affairs is boring and uninteresting full of unchallenged and unchallenging vague human interest.
The current obsession with the abject poverty of the £60,000K + brigade is also odd.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
This becomes arcane, but there is an error in your argument. Brexit gave us the opportunity to join EFTA/EEA in a Norway style deal. It is not true that no government ever wanted it. Norway had and has a government. We would then be in an economic but not political union, along with that basket case Norway. IMHO we start doing it right now, just 9 years too late.
I challenge that. I don't think EEA is the panacea supporters make it out to be.
Brexit has turned out the way I expected it to because people behaved in the way I expected them to. So naturally I claim after the fact that people acted rationally. The tyre hitting the road is that no-one has offered the UK a place in EEA and no UK government has explored the possibility of joining. When we left the club, we left behind the benefits.
We are where we are, could we join the EEA to limit the damage of Brexit? I am very much up for damage limitation so it is worth exploring. We would get a second class membership with many, but not all, of the benefits, and very little say in what they are. Do we want less say over things that affect us than we had as EU members? Maybe it's OK - this is damage limitation. Will the other countries agree to it? Subject to difficult and uncomfortable negotiations. Should we just go for the real thing?
These are all old and pointless arguments. We all know we won’t join the EU because of Schengen and the Euro, and we all know the EEA isn’t quite right for a country of our size. Spending the next 10-20 years arguing which bits to pay for access to is a distraction when the real systemic issues we face have nothing to do with Brexit and are about productivity and investment. Even if we had never left, we’d still be in no better place than France economically, and more or less where we are now. Though a Reform landslide (and resultant catastrophe) would be marginally more likely as Farage blamed everything on the EU. So in that respect we are much better off.
They are old arguments but they aren't pointless ones. The damage caused by Brexit is real. The firm consensus is that Brexit was a mistake, but there's no consensus on what to do about it, and that's a problem. I'm not saying necessarily rejoin but we do need a so far elusive workable solution that most people agree on.
And as I should have replied to @algarkirk, the sovereignty issue isn't arcane; it's the heart of the problem.
The crumb of comfort for Labour and Starmer is he leads by 8 points over Farage as best PM. Given how unpopular Starmer is this shows how polarising Farage is.
The crumb of comfort for Labour is how short term everyone's memory is. One giveaway budget in 2028 and Keir and Rachel are home and hosed
They are giving away 18 billion we cannot afford tomorrow
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
World income is grossly distorted - arguably by far the largest example of inequality on the planet. That makes migration a natural choice for the energetic (the lazy will just put up with whatever is available locally). That's independent of what is in the interest of the receiving country or the country that they're leaving (after all, the former country is losing its most energetic people), and it's possible that mass migration is in the interest of the majority of the migrants - who only have one life, after all - but not always of the recipient countries. One reason I favour substantial foreign aid (0.7% of GDP should be a minimum, not an abandoned maximum, and looking after migrants shouldn't be part of it) is to make massive migration less appealing.
If that is your incentive then we should cancel foreign aid by your logic as foreign aid will only make migration more appealing, not less.
People who are too poor to move don't (same as your lazy remark). It is statistically proven that as people become wealthier, the ability to move increases, so emigration increases it does not fall. That rise in emigration continues up the scale continuously.
One reason that global migration has shot up is not that world income is grossly distorted (it always has been), its that aid and globalisation etc has been so successful at ameliorating real poverty globally that people can now afford to move.
I imagine the propsect of Ed Milliband as Prime Minister will have everyone reaching for photos of a man and a bacon sandwich - no less amusing than a future Prime Minister stuck on a zip wire like a human pinata.
How often has the former leader of an Opposition party become Prime Minister? I'm struggling to think of an example - it would be analogous to Hague or IDS doing the same from the Conservative side? That's why I think it's as improbable as Boris Johnson returning - parties shouldn't look back or go back like football clubs re-hiring a previously sacked manager.
As for Starmer, there's no vacancy until he wants to go and he's only been PM for less than 18 months so I simply can't see it for all the wishful thinking on here. I don't rule out a successful re-election in 2029 and him standing down a couple of years later - yes, anyone who thinks the 2029 election is done and dusted for any party at this time is mad (or bad or even sad depending on the time of day when posting on here).
We've seen polling volatility before and while some think it will settle to a straight Reform vs Labour match up as the election approaches (and that would be the percentage call), that's far from guaranteed and we might well go in to the next election campaign with five parties between 15% and 25% (who knows?).
The failure of Your Party (thus far) suggests six parties in a five party system designed for two main parties doesn't work.
John Swinney? Does he count as a former leader of an Opposition party becoming First Minister?
And I think the failure of Your Party has less to do with the party system and more to do work the fractious nature of the left and Corbyn's and Sultana's personalities.
The biggest bias of the BBC (and I am a lifelong fan) is that it tries to convince us that news and current affairs is boring and uninteresting full of unchallenged and unchallenging vague human interest.
The current obsession with the abject poverty of the £60,000K + brigade is also odd.
Lets acknowledge their position in society has changed.
In the 1980s their bosses might earn 2x the £60k equivalent and they might earn 3x more than the entry level jobs.
Nowadays their bosses can earn 4x and they are earning 2x the entry level jobs. They are not poor or hard done by, but worse off than they would expect based on watching previous generations lifestyles.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
A choice between an economically illiterate fantasy land and an economically illiterate fantasy land with an undertow of racism and despotism.
The depressing thing in that article is nearly all (think bar one) of the desired budget changes are simply based on their very short term personal circumstances - i.e. I'm about to buy a house lets cut stamp duty. The people interviewed are not thinking at all about what is best for the economy or society.
We encourage politicians to give too much weight to such views.
I was intrigued by the alleged stamp duty bill for the first couple - given earnings and current mortgage payments, would a house attracting that much duty be within reach? Maybe they're sitting on a pile of cash/already very valuable house.
Don't overestimate the boost this poll gives Ed Miliband though. A September Sky poll of Labour members had Streeting, Cooper and Burnham all beating Ed Miliband head to head
As a Labour member the idea of Streeting, aggressively divisive to the right as he is, as leader is crazy, and most polls suggest that most current members agree. I concede that if lots of us migrated to Your Party after this weekend's conference that could change, but probably not. Whether EdM is the answer is more doubtful, but at least he seems to be giving issues important to members some constructive thought.
This petition calling for a public inquiry into Russian interference is now up to 13k, and growing fast. It's still early days, but it's notable that the percentage of people signing is highest in Wales.
This suggests that media coverage of Nathan Gill was considerably more extensive in Wales than elsewhere, which is disturbing because it suggests coverage of Gill's treason was insufficient outside Wales, given that it was a matter of UK national importance.
A wide ranging enquiry which included all parties rather than just a stick to beat Reform would be most welcome and not just political parties but lobbying groups
We have had plenty of accusations (even in The Guardian) that some climate groups have been funded, or part funded, by Russia.
No stone left unturned.
I suspect this is why it won’t happen as it would touch all the main parties bar, possibly, the Greens.
Oh, agreed. But Reform appear to have considerably more ... form regarding this.
This petition calling for a public inquiry into Russian interference is now up to 13k, and growing fast. It's still early days, but it's notable that the percentage of people signing is highest in Wales.
This suggests that media coverage of Nathan Gill was considerably more extensive in Wales than elsewhere, which is disturbing because it suggests coverage of Gill's treason was insufficient outside Wales, given that it was a matter of UK national importance.
A wide ranging enquiry which included all parties rather than just a stick to beat Reform would be most welcome and not just political parties but lobbying groups
We have had plenty of accusations (even in The Guardian) that some climate groups have been funded, or part funded, by Russia.
No stone left unturned.
I suspect this is why it won’t happen as it would touch all the main parties bar, possibly, the Greens.
Oh, agreed. But Reform appear to have considerably more ... form regarding this.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
The biggest bias of the BBC (and I am a lifelong fan) is that it tries to convince us that news and current affairs is boring and uninteresting full of unchallenged and unchallenging vague human interest.
The current obsession with the abject poverty of the £60,000K + brigade is also odd.
Lets acknowledge their position in society has changed.
In the 1980s their bosses might earn 2x the £60k equivalent and they might earn 3x more than the entry level jobs.
Nowadays their bosses can earn 4x and they are earning 2x the entry level jobs. They are not poor or hard done by, but worse off than they would expect based on watching previous generations lifestyles.
It also comes back to the housing theory of everything.
Earning £60k is great if you have no housing costs and lower tax rates (eg no NI on that).
Earning £60k when you need to pay taxes and housing and potentially 9% student loans etc does not leave anywhere near as much left over.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
World income is grossly distorted - arguably by far the largest example of inequality on the planet. That makes migration a natural choice for the energetic (the lazy will just put up with whatever is available locally). That's independent of what is in the interest of the receiving country or the country that they're leaving (after all, the former country is losing its most energetic people), and it's possible that mass migration is in the interest of the majority of the migrants - who only have one life, after all - but not always of the recipient countries. One reason I favour substantial foreign aid (0.7% of GDP should be a minimum, not an abandoned maximum, and looking after migrants shouldn't be part of it) is to make massive migration less appealing.
If that is your incentive then we should cancel foreign aid by your logic as foreign aid will only make migration more appealing, not less.
People who are too poor to move don't (same as your lazy remark). It is statistically proven that as people become wealthier, the ability to move increases, so emigration increases it does not fall. That rise in emigration continues up the scale continuously.
One reason that global migration has shot up is not that world income is grossly distorted (it always has been), its that aid and globalisation etc has been so successful at ameliorating real poverty globally that people can now afford to move.
That's an interesting point, but presumably the effect tails off when countries achieve developed country levels of prosperity. Is there much migration from, say, Slovenia, given the relative success of the economy there?
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Only some of the higher GDP is down to having more workers, GDP per head would also be higher because economic integration boosts productivity. And it's not Iike Brexit reduced immigration, either!
It massively reduced EU immigration.
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
Sometimes things are true but no use in real world arguments. It is true that Brexit gave us choices we didn't have before, and still does, which is a good thing. It is also true that since 2016 we have made a whole series of bad choices which is a bad thing.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
I think the ability to do things differently that no government so far has wanted to do differently, while necessarily losing many things we do want, and becoming poorer because of it - is a strange kind of sovereignty.
This becomes arcane, but there is an error in your argument. Brexit gave us the opportunity to join EFTA/EEA in a Norway style deal. It is not true that no government ever wanted it. Norway had and has a government. We would then be in an economic but not political union, along with that basket case Norway. IMHO we start doing it right now, just 9 years too late.
I challenge that. I don't think EEA is the panacea supporters make it out to be.
Brexit has turned out the way I expected it to because people behaved in the way I expected them to. So naturally I claim after the fact that people acted rationally. The tyre hitting the road is that no-one has offered the UK a place in EEA and no UK government has explored the possibility of joining. When we left the club, we left behind the benefits.
We are where we are, could we join the EEA to limit the damage of Brexit? I am very much up for damage limitation so it is worth exploring. We would get a second class membership with many, but not all, of the benefits, and very little say in what they are. Do we want less say over things that affect us than we had as EU members? Maybe it's OK - this is damage limitation. Will the other countries agree to it? Subject to difficult and uncomfortable negotiations. Should we just go for the real thing?
These are all old and pointless arguments. We all know we won’t join the EU because of Schengen and the Euro, and we all know the EEA isn’t quite right for a country of our size. Spending the next 10-20 years arguing which bits to pay for access to is a distraction when the real systemic issues we face have nothing to do with Brexit and are about productivity and investment. Even if we had never left, we’d still be in no better place than France economically, and more or less where we are now. Though a Reform landslide (and resultant catastrophe) would be marginally more likely as Farage blamed everything on the EU. So in that respect we are much better off.
They are old arguments but they aren't pointless ones. The damage caused by Brexit is real. The firm consensus is that Brexit was a mistake, but there's no consensus on what to do about it, and that's a problem. I'm not saying necessarily rejoin but we do need a so far elusive workable solution that most people agree on.
And as I should have replied to @algarkirk, the sovereignty issue isn't arcane; it's the heart of the problem.
Noted. Sovereignty is not arcane at all. The argument (which I think true) that Brexit was right even though we have used it to make all the wrong choices is arcane in the sense that it has too many stages in it and is counterintuitive.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from skilled migration.
We ought to be able to attract the best and brightest to boost our skills, complementing our skills from education.
If you look around the world the most successful economies, per capita, are those that encourage skilled migration. For the same reason as we have universal education, because having a skilled population boosts us all.
For some reason the UK has become hooked on unproductive, low skilled, migration. To fill unproductive, minimum wage jobs or cash in hand jobs. That just devalues our education, it doesn't supplement and boost it.
It isn’t since Sunak and Cleverly required migrants to get a job earning at least £38,700 before they could get a visa excluding health and social care
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
World income is grossly distorted - arguably by far the largest example of inequality on the planet. That makes migration a natural choice for the energetic (the lazy will just put up with whatever is available locally). That's independent of what is in the interest of the receiving country or the country that they're leaving (after all, the former country is losing its most energetic people), and it's possible that mass migration is in the interest of the majority of the migrants - who only have one life, after all - but not always of the recipient countries. One reason I favour substantial foreign aid (0.7% of GDP should be a minimum, not an abandoned maximum, and looking after migrants shouldn't be part of it) is to make massive migration less appealing.
If that is your incentive then we should cancel foreign aid by your logic as foreign aid will only make migration more appealing, not less.
People who are too poor to move don't (same as your lazy remark). It is statistically proven that as people become wealthier, the ability to move increases, so emigration increases it does not fall. That rise in emigration continues up the scale continuously.
One reason that global migration has shot up is not that world income is grossly distorted (it always has been), its that aid and globalisation etc has been so successful at ameliorating real poverty globally that people can now afford to move.
That's an interesting point, but presumably the effect tails off when countries achieve developed country levels of prosperity. Is there much migration from, say, Slovenia, given the relative success of the economy there?
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
World income is grossly distorted - arguably by far the largest example of inequality on the planet. That makes migration a natural choice for the energetic (the lazy will just put up with whatever is available locally). That's independent of what is in the interest of the receiving country or the country that they're leaving (after all, the former country is losing its most energetic people), and it's possible that mass migration is in the interest of the majority of the migrants - who only have one life, after all - but not always of the recipient countries. One reason I favour substantial foreign aid (0.7% of GDP should be a minimum, not an abandoned maximum, and looking after migrants shouldn't be part of it) is to make massive migration less appealing.
If that is your incentive then we should cancel foreign aid by your logic as foreign aid will only make migration more appealing, not less.
People who are too poor to move don't (same as your lazy remark). It is statistically proven that as people become wealthier, the ability to move increases, so emigration increases it does not fall. That rise in emigration continues up the scale continuously.
One reason that global migration has shot up is not that world income is grossly distorted (it always has been), its that aid and globalisation etc has been so successful at ameliorating real poverty globally that people can now afford to move.
That's an interesting point, but presumably the effect tails off when countries achieve developed country levels of prosperity. Is there much migration from, say, Slovenia, given the relative success of the economy there?
No it does not really tail off, unless it reaches the point that we emigrate there as much which does not really happen beyond a select very few nations.
As a proportion of local population approximately 1.5% of Slovenia's population has emigrated to the UK. Compare that to 0.19% for Pakistan, it is an order of magnitude out, not tailing off.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Which services was it?
Abington
For the sake of clarity I should point out that the hotel was not located at the Motorway services but at my final destination
Don't overestimate the boost this poll gives Ed Miliband though. A September Sky poll of Labour members had Streeting, Cooper and Burnham all beating Ed Miliband head to head
As a Labour member the idea of Streeting, aggressively divisive to the right as he is, as leader is crazy, and most polls suggest that most current members agree. I concede that if lots of us migrated to Your Party after this weekend's conference that could change, but probably not. Whether EdM is the answer is more doubtful, but at least he seems to be giving issues important to members some constructive thought.
Labour members prefer EdM, swing voters prefer Streeting, Burnham is popular with both
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
But that is very much a head in the clouds, philospohical, conversation, like talking about whether an acceptable fuel consumption for an ICE vehicle is 400mpg or 1000mpg. The Conservatives were maundering on about "10s of thousands" for more than a decade, whilst doing little practival and achieving even less.
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Which services was it?
Abington
For the sake of clarity I should point out that the hotel was not located at the Motorway services but at my final destination
I am very fond of Abington services, but there is a far higher chance of running over a goose there than there is of finding a readable book.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
For the avoidance of doubt, Tebay services is well south of Hadrian's Wall. Like, nearly 50 miles. But like Hadrian's Wall, Tebay Services is a day out in itself.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
We have; we've learned that the type of social and cultural change that we've had since Brexit has turned out rather different from that many people were clearly expecting....
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
But that is very much a head in the clouds, philospohical, conversation, like talking about whether an acceptable fuel consumption for an ICE vehicle is 400mpg or 1000mpg. The Conservatives were maundering on about "10s of thousands" for more than a decade, whilst doing little practival and achieving even less.
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
Practically, we had net migration of 0 plus or minus tens of thousands (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) for almost all of those 80 years. Its only from the late 90s onwards that's not been the case.
"A Brighton library, it reports, was due to host an “anti-racist” exhibition, featuring a “reimagined” Union flag made by a mixed-race son of immigrants. The flag is covered in images of small boats, and was made using “textiles from the UK’s diverse communities”. The council, however, has now decided to cancel it. Why? Believe it or not, it’s because it could have “inadvertently upset minority groups”."
Comments
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Everything else being equal then a Milliband govt would have run to 2019/20 and even if a pro-Brexit govt is then elected it runs into Covid before a Brexit referendum. I'd say that makes a vote for Brexit less likely but it's an "all bets are off" situation.
The interviewer completely missed the point on pricing, so I don't think we can conclude from the interview that Miliband doesn't "get it" on the actual point, when he explained correctly.
Being able to make your own decisions doesn't mean you'll always make good ones.
Does this mean waders or something a bit more…. Caberet?
Also, the Sam Browne should be… brown
One time I was walking back from riding lesson, down Cornmarket Street, in Oxford. Nice sunny morning. I realised I was getting some interesting looks.
Mainly because I was still wearing my long (black) riding boots. With black riding jeans. And was wearing a black shirt.
I hadn’t coordinated the shirt with the jeans - just grabbed something out of the wardrobe…
A political decision was then taken to ramp up global immigration, which I didn't agree with.
The choice remains ours.
When you have eliminated all that are impossible, then whoever remains, however unsuitable, must be the PM
All that's needed to sink Starmer is for someone else possible (in the minds of most of the electorate) to emerge.
Maybe I should head out to your service station and and spend a few hours with the Ice Twins.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
But if you are looking at your net profit after tax you have to compare the profit on selling fuel with the cost of selling washing powder. On the washing powder you pay 25% tax on your gross profit. On the fuel you pay 78%. So, to make the same net profit you need to make roughly 3x the gross profit that you do on the washing powder. So you charge your customers more.
Of course if for whatever reason the supermarket was selling on the international wholesale market they wouldn't get away with that. The market simply would not pay the higher premium. But Joe Public in the domestic market does not have that option. So they pay more to each of the suppliers available in their area, all of whom have the same problem. So the level of taxation does affect the price that the consumer pays.
That decision X gave us the chance to make good choices but we made bad ones and continue to do so renders decision X overwhelmingly difficult to argue for. Even though it was right.
Tbh I cannot recall any of the three wearing a trilby.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9d6zwppjvjo
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Kenneth-Clark-Life-Art-and-Civilisation-Audiobook/B01LTA6CI8
Edit: I read that a Homburg has a turned up brim edged with ribbon, so trilby it is.
We encourage politicians to give too much weight to such views.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/798973.stm
I imagine the propsect of Ed Milliband as Prime Minister will have everyone reaching for photos of a man and a bacon sandwich - no less amusing than a future Prime Minister stuck on a zip wire like a human pinata.
How often has the former leader of an Opposition party become Prime Minister? I'm struggling to think of an example - it would be analogous to Hague or IDS doing the same from the Conservative side? That's why I think it's as improbable as Boris Johnson returning - parties shouldn't look back or go back like football clubs re-hiring a previously sacked manager.
As for Starmer, there's no vacancy until he wants to go and he's only been PM for less than 18 months so I simply can't see it for all the wishful thinking on here. I don't rule out a successful re-election in 2029 and him standing down a couple of years later - yes, anyone who thinks the 2029 election is done and dusted for any party at this time is mad (or bad or even sad depending on the time of day when posting on here).
We've seen polling volatility before and while some think it will settle to a straight Reform vs Labour match up as the election approaches (and that would be the percentage call), that's far from guaranteed and we might well go in to the next election campaign with five parties between 15% and 25% (who knows?).
The failure of Your Party (thus far) suggests six parties in a five party system designed for two main parties doesn't work.
1) The 78% is paid on the profit made by selling the oil on the international market, the supermarket is downstream of that it doesn't pay 78% tax on petrol sales.
2) Supermarkets do not aim to make the same margin on every product, they aim to maximise overall profit, you may have encountered the term "loss leader" for example?
3) The cost to the UK consumer compared to consumers in other countries is determined by UK supply costs and taxes on oil and gas after it has been purchased on the global market.
The 78% windfall tax is applied to the profits made on production.
From the groups lobbying against the windfall tax
https://www.ineos.com/inch-magazine/articles/issue-29/ineos-calls-for-urgent-reform-of-uk-energy-tax/
"Today, the headline tax rate on the industry’s production profits stands at 78% – a rate set when prices peaked three years ago – and which has remained in place, despite oil and gas prices trending back towards pre-crisis levels."
https://www.nstauthority.co.uk/regulatory-information/exploration-and-production/taxation/
"The current marginal tax rate on income from UK and UKCS oil and gas extraction is 78%."
I like to be an optimist, there’s very few bad people around once we get past the Vladimir Putins, although there’s plenty of politicians with bad ideas.
YouGov continue to see much lower shares for Reform than other pollsters and the other parties statistically tied.
A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
#confused
This isn't a good thing. If you're going to cause this level of aggravation then you might as well actually do something interesting - e.g. boost growth with regional pricing, or bin pernicious standard charges. I think Miliband is similar to Starmer/Reeves in this respect, just with a better social media operation. That might be enough to win the leadership, but it's not going to be enough to rescue the government - I don't think there will be a big push to topple Starmer until such a character appears.
This is the problem politicians of all parties face - human nature (or greed if you prefer). Everyone wants more and expects the other guy to pay for it. That's a failure of our political education over a 40 or 50 year period - I'd argue. If you try to tell people the truth and particularly if it's unpleasant, they don't want to hear it and your opponents will decry you for telling bad news.
Brexit has turned out the way I expected it to because people behaved in the way I expected them to. So naturally I claim after the fact that people acted rationally. The tyre hitting the road is that no-one has offered the UK a place in EEA and no UK government has explored the possibility of joining. When we left the club, we left behind the benefits.
We are where we are, could we join the EEA to limit the damage of Brexit? I am very much up for damage limitation so it is worth exploring. We would get a second class membership with many, but not all, of the benefits, and very little say in what they are. Do we want less say over things that affect us than we had as EU members? Maybe it's OK - this is damage limitation. Will the other countries agree to it? Subject to difficult and uncomfortable negotiations. Should we just go for the real thing?
The Devil is in the detail, are you advocating, for example, tax cuts for working people (many pensioners and non workers also pay tax) and significant property asset taxation (workers tend to live in houses and flats as well)?
I've argued for Land Value Taxation whose time has come.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate.
But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
The problems begin when he starts passing his fantasies off as facts, a la Dan Brown.
Earl Russell in 1865.
Gladstone in 1880.
Bonar Law in 1922.
Ramsay Macdonald in 1924, depending on your definition of 'former leader of an opposition party' as the Labour leadership system was peculiar at the time.
Those are the only examples to hold office since 1832, and it is worth noting that two of them (Russell and Gladstone) were former Prime Ministers.
We ought to be able to attract the best and brightest to boost our skills, complementing our skills from education.
If you look around the world the most successful economies, per capita, are those that encourage skilled migration. For the same reason as we have universal education, because having a skilled population boosts us all.
For some reason the UK has become hooked on unproductive, low skilled, migration. To fill unproductive, minimum wage jobs or cash in hand jobs. That just devalues our education, it doesn't supplement and boost it.
The tax take needs to stay high for probably a decade or so to get the investment going, but it should be done with a view to lowering it back in the future as we start to see the benefits of such investment.
Mass house building is the easiest way to transfer wealth back to workers after the 15 years of QE and asset inflation.
The current obsession with the abject poverty of the £60,000K + brigade is also odd.
And as I should have replied to @algarkirk, the sovereignty issue isn't arcane; it's the heart of the problem.
People who are too poor to move don't (same as your lazy remark). It is statistically proven that as people become wealthier, the ability to move increases, so emigration increases it does not fall. That rise in emigration continues up the scale continuously.
One reason that global migration has shot up is not that world income is grossly distorted (it always has been), its that aid and globalisation etc has been so successful at ameliorating real poverty globally that people can now afford to move.
And I think the failure of Your Party has less to do with the party system and more to do work the fractious nature of the left and Corbyn's and Sultana's personalities.
In the 1980s their bosses might earn 2x the £60k equivalent and they might earn 3x more than the entry level jobs.
Nowadays their bosses can earn 4x and they are earning 2x the entry level jobs. They are not poor or hard done by, but worse off than they would expect based on watching previous generations lifestyles.
Maybe the other main parties are annoyed their not getting their cut 🤔
Earning £60k is great if you have no housing costs and lower tax rates (eg no NI on that).
Earning £60k when you need to pay taxes and housing and potentially 9% student loans etc does not leave anywhere near as much left over.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
As a proportion of local population approximately 1.5% of Slovenia's population has emigrated to the UK. Compare that to 0.19% for Pakistan, it is an order of magnitude out, not tailing off.
For the sake of clarity I should point out that the hotel was not located at the Motorway services but at my final destination
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/25/artist-makes-anti-racist-british-flag-brighton-council/