If you say they will draft it with the use of AI and use What3Words for explaining where they will land,* will Leon's spontaneous orgasm be heard all the way from Bangkok to Phuket?
God that’s so negative. The aliens might be fluffy and nice. They might all be super hot humanoids looking for a planet of new sex partners or give us some amazing technology that makes earth better.
Someone needs to tell the BoE that “Mars Attacks” wasn’t a documentary.
That is the hope. A very large majority of Americans oppose this idiocy. The same isn't true, though, of the Republican Party itself.
This year will determine whether both US democracy and the western alliance have any future. It is that stark.
Unfortunately, whilst the USA is run by Mad King Donald, with the guardrails and check and balances destroyed, I'd say for Foreign Policy and most of Domestic Policy in the short term "a very large majority of Americans opposing the idiocy" are 90% irrelevant.
I think a fairly significant chunk of Trump support have an ideological commitment where they would see the USA as a blasted heath, or at least the prospect of it, aided and abetted by a cartoon perception of anything outside the borders, such that there will be a hell of a lot of damage to everything before they wind their necks in.
The series of fantasy claims and speeches, stuffed full of BS, by JD Vance, eg Munich in Feb 2025, are not exactly encouraging.
They are down their rabbit hole, head first, and they will not be coming out. I think it will need to collapse around their ears.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Last night one of my Tweets about Greenland went viral, I'd say about 40% of the replies are MAGA bullshit by Brits.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
I told JohnO before Christmas that I have been headhunted to go work for one of these Middle Eastern banks/governments/investment firms.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Last night one of my Tweets about Greenland went viral, I'd say about 40% of the replies are MAGA bullshit by Brits.
Hard to see how it is going to impact day to day life. The rolling news coverage will be a bit single-topic for three or four days. But then, Traitors is back. Spurs will keep finding innovative ways to lose. There'll be a new Reform defector. Unless ther eis an oppoerunity see them drive around London in an open top bus, how will thwy impact our lives.
Unless its THE Alien of course. Then we might be a bit fucked by the chest-bursters. But not sure what BoE planning can do in that event.
That is the hope. A very large majority of Americans oppose this idiocy. The same isn't true, though, of the Republican Party itself.
This year will determine whether both US democracy and the western alliance have any future. It is that stark.
When things get (slightly) quieter the GOP will forget all this in a week. I know I have a pessimistic view of the situation there, and HYUFD will point to the polling on Greenland is not good even among the GOP, but I'm convinced that's already changing, and the more aggressive Trump gets the more his voters will get behind him not less - in part because at that point the choice is backing the Dems/impeachment, or sticking with Trump even as he does this stuff.
And I think the polarisation is so strong they would not do the former, it would be psychologicaly too hard to.
It takes only 1.4% of GOP House Representatives to vote with the Democrats for a majority of the House to impeach Trump again.
It takes only 24.5% of GOP Senators to vote with the Democrats to then convict Trump in the Senate and force him out of office
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Last night one of my Tweets about Greenland went viral, I'd say about 40% of the replies are MAGA bullshit by Brits.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
On the economic front at least Trump's tariffs against China are taking them on economically, even if on the international relations front he is sucking up to Russia and antagonising Nato allies
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
According to Galea's decades of research, there have been 38 similar fires claiming about 1,200 lives since the year 2000. Fifteen involved some form of pyrotechnics and about 13 involved acoustic foam or decorative materials.
Given these precedents, some may wonder why we do not appear to be learning the lessons.
1) if you are in a bar and fire starts, leave immediately 2) Places with a stripped out overhead - bare concrete ceiling with all pipes and cables exposed - are much safer 3) indoor fireworks are for the stupid.
The videos of that fire at new years were utterly horrific. People filming the fire with phones as if it were no big deal, except that they would have known they were in a basement with a single narrow staircase as the only exit.
It’s bad enough already to have such a small and inaccessible room set up as an entertainment venue, even before the pyrotechnics and foam ceiling are added to the mix.
I really hope anyone with teenagers has shown them those videos and made sure they understand to evacuate immediately. Most of the kids in the videos never got out.
Similar behaviour was seen at the King's Cross fire in 1987 which killed 31 people – passengers evacuating the station stopped at the phone booths (ask your gran) to call home. Perhaps we have evolved to control fire, not fear it.
Very few people have experienced fire that is out of control (mentioned in the article). We have gas cookers, candles, BBQs and ornamental fireplaces.
My eldest was rather shocked, when I got her a fire extinguisher for the kitchen in the place she is renting for Uni.
God that’s so negative. The aliens might be fluffy and nice. They might all be super hot humanoids looking for a planet of new sex partners or give us some amazing technology that makes earth better.
Someone needs to tell the BoE that “Mars Attacks” wasn’t a documentary.
It’s worse than that. They want all the 40k miniatures. And they don’t stop at stop lines on roundabouts.
That is the hope. A very large majority of Americans oppose this idiocy. The same isn't true, though, of the Republican Party itself.
This year will determine whether both US democracy and the western alliance have any future. It is that stark.
When things get (slightly) quieter the GOP will forget all this in a week. I know I have a pessimistic view of the situation there, and HYUFD will point to the polling on Greenland is not good even among the GOP, but I'm convinced that's already changing, and the more aggressive Trump gets the more his voters will get behind him not less - in part because at that point the choice is backing the Dems/impeachment, or sticking with Trump even as he does this stuff.
And I think the polarisation is so strong they would not do the former, it would be psychologicaly too hard to.
It takes only 1.4% of GOP House Representatives to vote with the Democrats for a majority of the House to impeach Trump again.
It takes only 24.5% of GOP Senators to vote with the Democrats to then convict Trump in the Senate and force him out of office
I doubt any of that will happen soon enough to stop him
Europe and Denmark will need to do a deal but I expect Trump will still want ownership
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though. A view on the economy is hardly a MAGA talking point. For example the discussion on tuition fees has been going on. That’s broadly aged based. By your criteria that makes it a MAGA talking point ?
If it’s 60% of over 55’s and 55% of the population as a whole then that 14.5% figure increases markedly.
It’s just BS plucked from the air from MAGA obsessives
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
I told JohnO before Christmas that I have been headhunted to go work for one of these Middle Eastern banks/governments/investment firms.
They ain't messing around.
Indeed, when I was open to offers I spoke to a few ME companies coming in at well into seven figures tax free to go and work in Riyadh or Kuwait.
I would never make my wife move to the Middle East and live in a gilded cage so it was a non-starters but the offers were up to 10x what I eventually took here.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Last night one of my Tweets about Greenland went viral, I'd say about 40% of the replies are MAGA bullshit by Brits.
According to Galea's decades of research, there have been 38 similar fires claiming about 1,200 lives since the year 2000. Fifteen involved some form of pyrotechnics and about 13 involved acoustic foam or decorative materials.
Given these precedents, some may wonder why we do not appear to be learning the lessons.
1) if you are in a bar and fire starts, leave immediately 2) Places with a stripped out overhead - bare concrete ceiling with all pipes and cables exposed - are much safer 3) indoor fireworks are for the stupid.
The videos of that fire at new years were utterly horrific. People filming the fire with phones as if it were no big deal, except that they would have known they were in a basement with a single narrow staircase as the only exit.
It’s bad enough already to have such a small and inaccessible room set up as an entertainment venue, even before the pyrotechnics and foam ceiling are added to the mix.
I really hope anyone with teenagers has shown them those videos and made sure they understand to evacuate immediately. Most of the kids in the videos never got out.
Similar behaviour was seen at the King's Cross fire in 1987 which killed 31 people – passengers evacuating the station stopped at the phone booths (ask your gran) to call home. Perhaps we have evolved to control fire, not fear it.
Very few people have experienced fire that is out of control (mentioned in the article). We have gas cookers, candles, BBQs and ornamental fireplaces.
My eldest was rather shocked, when I got her a fire extinguisher for the kitchen in the place she is renting for Uni.
Many years ago, when inspecting a Care Home, I commented adversely on the fact that the fire extinguisher in the medicine storage area was chained to the wall, and was told that one of the residents was in the habit of taking any he found unchained into the dining room. The management hadn't found a way round it yet!
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
I told JohnO before Christmas that I have been headhunted to go work for one of these Middle Eastern banks/governments/investment firms.
They ain't messing around.
Indeed, when I was open to offers I spoke to a few ME companies coming in at well into seven figures tax free to go and work in Riyadh or Kuwait.
I would never make my wife move to the Middle East and live in a gilded cage so it was a non-starters but the offers were up to 10x what I eventually took here.
This job would be UK based, like you I have no desire to work in the Middle East.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
As I say frequently to an uncomfortable silence, America don't owe it to Britain to elect someone we like. If we'd wanted to demonstrate some independence from the USA in this sort of situation, the time to look after that was over the last 7 decades when we gave ever more power to the US, allowed the US to gobble up key British companies, made our armed services and intelligence systems indivisible from theirs, and adopted an unecessarily servile approach compared to countries of similar size.
Truss gave an anecdote in her show of the Foreign Office changing her speech without asking her. When she demanded to know why, they told her it was because they'd checked it with the State Department. Why would the US State Department get a veto over the words of the British Foreign Secretary. That is toxic and totally against democracy.
Sadly, we're so demoralised (certainly PBers seem to be) that instead of being determined to do better, and to gradually reclaim our sovereignty, we think the best thing to do in this situation is to jump straight into bed with the EU, thus giving up even MORE independence to someone ELSE. As if Europe would never choose a leader we don't like. I mean get a grip PB for the love of God.
I think America owes it to America to choose a leader compatible with USA interests, of which one is "someone our allies - including the UK - like". Not to do so is to destroy the US interest, which is what is currently in process.
Now, they have already gone a huge distance in destroying the US interest, starting with burning down much of their international influence, and much of a system set up largely by them to promote and institutionalise US hegemony. That is now gone - what comes next? I think an underlying problem, in addition to Trump listening to voices in his head, is MAGA types like Vance and Miller, not understanding the USA's position.
I don't see any "jumping back into bed with EU"; I see Starmer looking, quite slowly, for an effective way of running Brexit and working with the EU - a promise on which the former Government(s) welched. I think most PBers agree that the Starmer Govt is too cautious, and in his desire to avoid the downside risks lsoign the upside too. They current Government were left with a pig in a poke, and whatever happens next, they start from there.
Do you have an approx link to the Liz Truss anecdote? The episode is good enough. There's a possible parallel with an anecdote told by Rory Tewart about his attempts to stop a particular programme in Afghanistan that he knew would be hijacked by Armed Groups, and his Civil Servants telling him that he did not have authority to stop programmes run by the department in which he was Minister. They both sound like a Sir Humprey problem.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
I told JohnO before Christmas that I have been headhunted to go work for one of these Middle Eastern banks/governments/investment firms.
They ain't messing around.
Indeed, when I was open to offers I spoke to a few ME companies coming in at well into seven figures tax free to go and work in Riyadh or Kuwait.
I would never make my wife move to the Middle East and live in a gilded cage so it was a non-starters but the offers were up to 10x what I eventually took here.
This job would be UK based, like you I have no desire to work in the Middle East.
If we don’t value our businesses and assets and we don’t see that reflected in valuations then others will.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
It is interesting that it is the reired triple lockers who are pessimistic over the economy while those of working age are more positive.
In part it is viewing the economy through the prism of their politics, but also it must be that anyone under forty has only known a stagnant economy. Those who remember the boom and forget the busts of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are all retired or nearly so, and looking back through their rose tinted specs.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
God that’s so negative. The aliens might be fluffy and nice. They might all be super hot humanoids looking for a planet of new sex partners or give us some amazing technology that makes earth better.
Someone needs to tell the BoE that “Mars Attacks” wasn’t a documentary.
What 6 words. Allows precise location in the extra dimensions.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
It is interesting that it is the reired triple lockers who are pessimistic over the economy while those of working age are more positive.
In part it is viewing the economy through the prism of their politics, but also it must be that anyone under forty has only known a stagnant economy. Those who remember the boom and forget the busts of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are all retired or nearly so, and looking back through their rose tinted specs.
I’m not there yet but I suspect some of the pessimism is rooted in investments. When you’re younger if there’s a crash you’ve got time to recover. The older you get the less time you have to do that.
I’m pessimistic for the global economy at the age of 60, due to that lunatic in the Whitehouse.
You invest, how are you feeling about it. I suspect this is the Trump playbook and it will work out and the market go up, especially as the fed gets more doveish. But you never know what this loon is going to do next.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Supermac leaving the Toon for Arsenal was an act of gross treachery.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
I told JohnO before Christmas that I have been headhunted to go work for one of these Middle Eastern banks/governments/investment firms.
They ain't messing around.
Indeed, when I was open to offers I spoke to a few ME companies coming in at well into seven figures tax free to go and work in Riyadh or Kuwait.
I would never make my wife move to the Middle East and live in a gilded cage so it was a non-starters but the offers were up to 10x what I eventually took here.
There’s an awful lot of people who live in Dubai and commute weekly to Riyadh or Kuwait. Emirates airline flies A380s on these routes at the start and end of the week.
You could stick it for a couple of years and then retire early.
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed conspiracy theories.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
I’m not getting upset about anything. I don’t know how you can misconstrue that from my comment, I am challenging the information you provided. I said there had always been diverging views on the economy, you said there weren’t and offered a graph on consumer confidence. It started with a point where views were divergent and showed a trend where this grew.
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed conspiracy theories.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
It is interesting that it is the reired triple lockers who are pessimistic over the economy while those of working age are more positive.
In part it is viewing the economy through the prism of their politics, but also it must be that anyone under forty has only known a stagnant economy. Those who remember the boom and forget the busts of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are all retired or nearly so, and looking back through their rose tinted specs.
I’m not there yet but I suspect some of the pessimism is rooted in investments. When you’re younger if there’s a crash you’ve got time to recover. The older you get the less time you have to do that.
I’m pessimistic for the global economy at the age of 60, due to that lunatic in the Whitehouse.
You invest, how are you feeling about it. I suspect this is the Trump playbook and it will work out and the market go up, especially as the fed gets more doveish. But you never know what this loon is going to do next.
Investing in the markets is rather different to Consumer confidence. I do have 6 figures invested as savings in various forms. About 2/3 is currently in cash, the other third in fairly defensive equities, of which half is overseas equities.
Perhaps I am too pessimistic, but the markets are looking rather peaky, and there is a pretty high chance of a major correction this year, perhaps the AI bubble popping, perhaps renewed trade war, perhaps China blockading Taiwan.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
I’m not getting upset about anything. I don’t know how you can misconstrue that from my comment, I am challenging the information you provided. I said there had always been diverging views on the economy, you said there weren’t and offered a graph on consumer confidence. It started with a point where views were divergent and showed a trend where this grew.
Marginally divergent. And they used to move together very closely. You were wrong to suggest they were always different.
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed conspiracy theories.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
They live among us.
Anecdotally, my niece when she was younger was fascinated and really into two things. Justin Bieber and the illuminati. That was about 20 years ago. I don’t really know what the Illuminati are.
Now she’s fascinated by serial killer podcasts and pole dancing.
Many of those are not MAGA talking points just general conspiracy theories. The claim was specific to Reform voters and MAGA talking points.
I would not dispute about 15% of the population buy into conspiracy theories.
7/7 being hoax, or 9/11 being an inside job or the great replacement theory or 15 minute cities all predate MAGA.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Supermac leaving the Toon for Arsenal was an act of gross treachery.
I recall when after two spectacularly ineffective FA Cup final appearances (one each for both teams) he became the answer to the question, 'What is taken to the FA Cup Final every year, but never used?'
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Supermac leaving the Toon for Arsenal was an act of gross treachery.
I recall when after two spectacularly ineffective FA Cup final appearances (one each for both teams) he became the answer to the question, 'What is taken to the FA Cup Final every year, but never used?'
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
I’m not getting upset about anything. I don’t know how you can misconstrue that from my comment, I am challenging the information you provided. I said there had always been diverging views on the economy, you said there weren’t and offered a graph on consumer confidence. It started with a point where views were divergent and showed a trend where this grew.
Marginally divergent. And they used to move together very closely. You were wrong to suggest they were always different.
You provided no evidence to prove me wrong, just that it had diverged 👍
I also am mystified why you said I was upset when I was just discussing the point.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
The family silver was being sold to members of the family as the UK was running a trade surplus at that time.
The continuous trade deficit is something which began under Gordon Brown, aided by the media ceasing to report the trade balance.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
As I say frequently to an uncomfortable silence, America don't owe it to Britain to elect someone we like. If we'd wanted to demonstrate some independence from the USA in this sort of situation, the time to look after that was over the last 7 decades when we gave ever more power to the US, allowed the US to gobble up key British companies, made our armed services and intelligence systems indivisible from theirs, and adopted an unecessarily servile approach compared to countries of similar size.
Truss gave an anecdote in her show of the Foreign Office changing her speech without asking her. When she demanded to know why, they told her it was because they'd checked it with the State Department. Why would the US State Department get a veto over the words of the British Foreign Secretary. That is toxic and totally against democracy.
Sadly, we're so demoralised (certainly PBers seem to be) that instead of being determined to do better, and to gradually reclaim our sovereignty, we think the best thing to do in this situation is to jump straight into bed with the EU, thus giving up even MORE independence to someone ELSE. As if Europe would never choose a leader we don't like. I mean get a grip PB for the love of God.
I dont want us to rejoin the EU but we need a security alliance with neighbouring, democratic nations to reduce risk of being bullied by US or threatened by Russia. We can't go it alone.
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
The family silver was being sold to members of the family as the UK was running a trade surplus at that time.
The continuous trade deficit is something which began under Gordon Brown, aided by the media ceasing to report the trade balance.
The balance of trade figures used to lead the news.
I guess it must have stopped around the time of the Single Market in 1992, when the methodology would have changed.
The recent explosion in the trade deficit is since China joined the WTO in 2001, shipping us increasing thousands of containers of cheap tat.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Agreed, I've been saying this for a while. Trump is immune from prosecution, but his family and inner circle are not. If the dems regain power many of those people are going to end up in a cell. His actions in Minneapolis are the first step in the plan; treat the people so badly that state authorities have to act, then use that as an excuse to escalate until the place is on fire. Then invoke the insurrection act.
Way too many are in denial about this. Trump only has two ways to stay in power - a complete fascist takeover, or plunge the US into civil war and hope he can secure power over the MAGA leaning states. Whichever happens, our close relationship with the US is at an end, and as an (I suppose now former) atlantacist that is something I did not expect to ever be writing.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
We've had near two decades of a pretty stagnant economy. That isn't doomladen, it's the truth. Home ownership falling among the young too. The older generation look back to an era of higher expectations.
On the Process State - people have asked what process should look like.
Well, how about food hygiene standards in restaurants? In general, the regulations are intelligible and not especially overlong. There is lots of enforcement, and the result is the simple hygiene rating that they display in the window.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
As I say frequently to an uncomfortable silence, America don't owe it to Britain to elect someone we like. If we'd wanted to demonstrate some independence from the USA in this sort of situation, the time to look after that was over the last 7 decades when we gave ever more power to the US, allowed the US to gobble up key British companies, made our armed services and intelligence systems indivisible from theirs, and adopted an unecessarily servile approach compared to countries of similar size.
Truss gave an anecdote in her show of the Foreign Office changing her speech without asking her. When she demanded to know why, they told her it was because they'd checked it with the State Department. Why would the US State Department get a veto over the words of the British Foreign Secretary. That is toxic and totally against democracy.
Sadly, we're so demoralised (certainly PBers seem to be) that instead of being determined to do better, and to gradually reclaim our sovereignty, we think the best thing to do in this situation is to jump straight into bed with the EU, thus giving up even MORE independence to someone ELSE. As if Europe would never choose a leader we don't like. I mean get a grip PB for the love of God.
I dont want us to rejoin the EU but we need a security alliance with neighbouring, democratic nations to reduce risk of being bullied by US or threatened by Russia. We can't go it alone.
We need to be willing to fund strategic security.
Alliances need to have the means to back up their commitments.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
We've had near two decades of a pretty stagnant economy. That isn't doomladen, it's the truth. Home ownership falling among the young too. The older generation look back to an era of higher expectations.
We should, though, perhaps be heartened more by the consumer confidence of the young than depressed by the lack of confidence of the old. It means there’s upside opportunity if we can get those older generations more cheerful, because as a cohort they are loaded. Savings rates are the highest for decades - too high. Net savings and wealth are at record levels and household debt is the lowest it’s been since before the financial crisis. So there is dry powder there for a consumer boom.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
The problem for all right wing parties is how they manage this. What Trump is doing is totally unacceptable. They need to be clear and unified on it and they need to put distance between themselves and Trump. I agreed with the Twitter post I shared yesterday, it’s an open goal for the left.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
Countries are going to have to carefully balance the domestic effects vs price of Chinese cars, especially with regard to electric cars.
Farage is unburdened by thoughts of Net Zero targets, so can easily take the more protectionist route. The big one is the EU, which until recently has been pretty much self-sufficient in cars.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
How is The Plough pub a critical UK asset? I think we could probably also get by without The Perfume Shop and Chiswick Business Park.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three yearYes - Canada s. They’re everywhere!
Yes. Canada frustrates UK cheesemongers.
At the start of 2025 they swapped from being in the "EU quota" to the "non-EU quota", which caused problems.
That was one that neither BoJo or Fizzy Lizzy had sorted out.
Outside the quantity quota, tariffs are 275% .
One area where I have criticised Mr Starmer is on trade with Canada, which we should be able to address more under CPTPP, but of which I have not seen much evidence.
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
The problem for all right wing parties is how they manage this. What Trump is doing is totally unacceptable. They need to be clear and unified on it and they need to put distance between themselves and Trump. I agreed with the Twitter post I shared yesterday, it’s an open goal for the left.
Longer term, they also need to lay out what their vision of governance is that doesn’t go down the same route as Trump (or Orbán).
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
We've had near two decades of a pretty stagnant economy. That isn't doomladen, it's the truth. Home ownership falling among the young too. The older generation look back to an era of higher expectations.
We should, though, perhaps be heartened more by the consumer confidence of the young than depressed by the lack of confidence of the old. It means there’s upside opportunity if we can get those older generations more cheerful, because as a cohort they are loaded. Savings rates are the highest for decades - too high. Net savings and wealth are at record levels and household debt is the lowest it’s been since before the financial crisis. So there is dry powder there for a consumer boom.
Though the 'young' are not a monolithic block.
As I've said before for northern working class young men who want to learn a trade and own a home things have been good for a few years.
For the debt ridden, renting middle class southern young its a whole different experience.
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
Taz questioned earlier whether 14.5% of Brits are really sharing MAGA conspiracy theories online. Never mind that: these stats suggest that 29% of Americans - that’s roughly a hundred million people if the poll is representative - support “using military force to acquire Greenland”.
Incredible.
No 4% do, the other 25% don't know
14.5% seems a little low to me. Recent polling (2023) by Savanta for a KCL study:
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed conspiracy theories.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
The problem for all right wing parties is how they manage this. What Trump is doing is totally unacceptable. They need to be clear and unified on it and they need to put distance between themselves and Trump. I agreed with the Twitter post I shared yesterday, it’s an open goal for the left.
It's an open goal for the centre-right too.
Suck air through teeth. "Oooh, I wouldn't do it like THAT....."
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
The problem for all right wing parties is how they manage this. What Trump is doing is totally unacceptable. They need to be clear and unified on it and they need to put distance between themselves and Trump. I agreed with the Twitter post I shared yesterday, it’s an open goal for the left.
Unless the moderate right actually goes in harder on Trump than the left. Badenoch sort of hinted at that yesterday - brutal, cynical politics because Starmer doesn't have much choice but to try and keep the maniac onside.
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
We've had near two decades of a pretty stagnant economy. That isn't doomladen, it's the truth. Home ownership falling among the young too. The older generation look back to an era of higher expectations.
We should, though, perhaps be heartened more by the consumer confidence of the young than depressed by the lack of confidence of the old. It means there’s upside opportunity if we can get those older generations more cheerful, because as a cohort they are loaded. Savings rates are the highest for decades - too high. Net savings and wealth are at record levels and household debt is the lowest it’s been since before the financial crisis. So there is dry powder there for a consumer boom.
Though the 'young' are not a monolithic block.
As I've said before for northern working class young men who want to learn a trade and own a home things have been good for a few years.
For the debt ridden, renting middle class southern young its a whole different experience.
Depends, those of the latter who get a job in the City, in senior management for a big company or for an engineering firm or as a GP or surgeon will still be doing best of all
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
I feel like I have at times sounded almost hysterical warning that Trump was a fascist and America was no longer an ally. And now here we are with his stormtroopers murdering Americans at random to create the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend chunks of the constitution, and with ultimatums issued to their supposedly closest allies to cede territory or else.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
Trump is safe from jail, but his people are not.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
The self-serving petty calculations of both sides of the political establishment were disastrous.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
The former is true. I’m not convinced there’s evidence for the latter.
If the latter were true, why was Trump complaining about 'lawfare' due to the innumerable lawsuits he was facing? (And not a few of his apologists on here were complaining about, I might add, as was @rcs1000 who thought it was a waste of time that could have been better spent.)
Or, indeed, why did they impeach him within a week of his attempt to seize power?
Or why did the Supreme Court feel the need to call in a decision from Washington DC and then sit on it for months, before delivering a verdict that revealed at least four justices are one of drugged, insane or corrupt? (Or indeed any combination thereof.)
And why, if they were not pursuing him, was he repeatedly found guilty of various crimes?
That Trump was at liberty and able to run again is a shocking indictment of the American justice system and how it doesn't apply to rich people. Not the Dems' unwillingness to prosecute.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
Aren't they owned by an Australian?
30 years of deficits manifest. But the trade deficit doesn't matter, according to Gordon Brown and all of his successors.
And a fair few of his predecessors.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
Not really. When I was young the trade deficit was a monthly news item, the amount of currency you could take out of the country was restricted and even when nationalised companies were sold the government routinely took a golden share to prevent the company falling completely into foreign ownership. It was the initial surpluses of north sea oil and the new thinking that supported Brown's endogenous growth theories that claimed that trade balances didn't really matter.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
Do you feel the same about the US trade deficit?
Well, that's their problem rather than ours but yes, it weakens the USA and makes them vulnerable to China, for example. I agree with Trump's identification of the problem but I certainly do not agree with his solutions such as tariffs. I believe they will seriously damage the US to the detriment of the west (if such a thing still exists).
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
The problem for Farage is not (just) that he’s a traitor, but that Trump’s second presidency is the logical endpoint of the populist right movement. This is the model he wants us to follow. And we can all now see it’s a failure.
The problem for all right wing parties is how they manage this. What Trump is doing is totally unacceptable. They need to be clear and unified on it and they need to put distance between themselves and Trump. I agreed with the Twitter post I shared yesterday, it’s an open goal for the left.
Unless the moderate right actually goes in harder on Trump than the left. Badenoch sort of hinted at that yesterday - brutal, cynical politics because Starmer doesn't have much choice but to try and keep the maniac onside.
I don't think remaining Tory voters are fans of Trump, but can such actions start to encourage more peopel to come back? I don't think most left the Tories because they were too pro-Trump, even if many of those who have gone to Reform are Trumpier than average.
Selling England by the pound. Britain's newspaper of record worries about Chinese purchases of whatever is not already owned by Americans and Europeans.
You should see what the UAE is buying up. Brands. They like brands. Big famous names.
Abu Dhabi alone has been doing deals at the rate of $5 billion A DAY...
ADIA investment fund alone has around $1trn under management at the moment.
There’s also plenty in of cash in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, all finding a home in the West.
China is definitely the big future threat, because they’re building up monopolies for commodity as well as technological products. As we all should have realised during the pandemic. Canada are out of their minds to drop tariffs on Chinese cars, they’ll be everywhere by next year, although ironically the biggest seller of them will probably be an American company, Tesla.
The lower 6.1% tariff on Chinese cars by Canada is limited to 49k vehicles per annum. That is, 2.5% of market, with a potential increase to 3.5% of market over 5 years.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
Ah okay, I didn’t realise they’d put a low cap on the car imports, which makes more sense.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
Apparently Farage is under the weather and couldn’t make LK .
Yes right ! Obviously he didn’t want answer uncomfortable questions about his relationship with Trump .
It is his usual 'duck and cover' approach when Trump is being particularly egregious. Not that Trump is massively popular with Reform voters, but he is more popular than with other voters, and going silent (or sticking to careful written statements) about being pro-Trump in such moments usually allows things to blow over.
He won't be able to get away with ducking things like that on this or other issues forever, when he is in with a shot of being PM.
If he's lucky though it won't hurt him until after he's already in office. It took a long time for Corbyn's unchanging views on foreign affairs to have any impact at all.
One party stands out in this table. It seems a fair number of Reform voters are Trump bootlickers:
It is really interesting that Reform is so out of line on this. 39% "strongly oppose". If the bulk of Reform's support is from former Tories, then they must have had their minds melted in the journey across.
I think about half of the Reform vote is from weathy older Shire voters not unlike the Tories, but the other half is from those swapping various MAGA conspiracy theories on Social Media.
All parties are coalitions, but this doesn't seem a natural fit in the long term. Farage knows this and its one reason that he won't criticize Trump.
You seriously think about 14.5% of the country are swapping MAGA conspiracy stories online 🙄
I wouldn't be surprised. Take a quick look at facebook comments on any news article - it's febrile, doomsday vibes over there. And it has astonishing reach - over 60% of over 55s visit facebook every day, and spend about an hour on it on average.
It probably explains why there are such divergent views on the economy among age groups.
There’s always been divergent views on the economy among age groups though.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Firstly that’s consumer confidence and secondly that does show divergent views going back to the base point. It is just they have diverged more over time and that cannot all be down to Facebook politics groups
Why are you getting so upset about this? It demonstrates that perception of the economy has wildly differed across age groups since Labour got in; myself and a few others have pointed out that the kind of media (social or otherwise) that older people consume is different to younger people, and quite extraordinarily doomladen.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
Most of the older people I know are upset about the future for their kids. And their kids.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
We've had near two decades of a pretty stagnant economy. That isn't doomladen, it's the truth. Home ownership falling among the young too. The older generation look back to an era of higher expectations.
We should, though, perhaps be heartened more by the consumer confidence of the young than depressed by the lack of confidence of the old. It means there’s upside opportunity if we can get those older generations more cheerful, because as a cohort they are loaded. Savings rates are the highest for decades - too high. Net savings and wealth are at record levels and household debt is the lowest it’s been since before the financial crisis. So there is dry powder there for a consumer boom.
From the data I can find our savings levels are unremarkable. Of course there is less household debt than there was at the time of the financial crisis - and a good thing too. It was way too high. I'm not sure encouraging the old to throw away their savings is going to answer anything,
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
Sorry, but is anyone falling for Farage’s bizarre whataboutery on the Chagos Islands and his attempt to distract us from Greenland?
Gosh, whatever kept him off the telly this morning must have come on quickly.
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Even Blair and Thatcher and Johnson fought hopeless seats before they got selected for a winnable one, you can't just expect to waltz into a safe seat automatically without any campaigning experience in a tougher seat or standing for local council. Several former PMs and party leaders, Major, May and Corbyn for example were elected as local councillors first and Farage has fought many seats he had little chance of winning.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
His own cousin, surely, unless his previous wife was his sister?
Under English law at the time, if you were married to somebody you were legally considered that person for marital purposes.
When Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, he had to obtain a papal dispensation because she had been married to his brother.
He claimed, in the dispensation, that Catherine and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. When he wanted an annulment, he claimed she had misled him on this point.
Similarly, he annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn before beheading her on the grounds he'd previously been shagging her sister Mary.
Comments
*HTAF did autocorrect make that 'lend?'
Someone needs to tell the BoE that “Mars Attacks” wasn’t a documentary.
71% of Americans (and 60% of Republicans) oppose using military force to take Greenland according to an Ipsos poll last week.
US voters also oppose trying to acquire Greenland by a 30% margin (though Republicans do back trying to buy Greenland by a 13% margin).
66% of Americans are also concerned trying to acquire Greenland could harm US relations with Europe and NATO (albeit again 58% of Republican voters aren't)
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/just-one-five-americans-support-trumps-efforts-acquire-greenland-reutersipsos-2026-01-14/
I think a fairly significant chunk of Trump support have an ideological commitment where they would see the USA as a blasted heath, or at least the prospect of it, aided and abetted by a cartoon perception of anything outside the borders, such that there will be a hell of a lot of damage to everything before they wind their necks in.
The series of fantasy claims and speeches, stuffed full of BS, by JD Vance, eg Munich in Feb 2025, are not exactly encouraging.
They are down their rabbit hole, head first, and they will not be coming out. I think it will need to collapse around their ears.
They ain't messing around.
After targeting the crown jewels, Take Back Power is shifting its attention to supermarkets
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/18/custard-throwing-activists-plan-mass-shoplifting-waitrose/ (£££)
Unless its THE Alien of course. Then we might be a bit fucked by the chest-bursters. But not sure what BoE planning can do in that event.
It takes only 24.5% of GOP Senators to vote with the Democrats to then convict Trump in the Senate and force him out of office
I'd never realised he looked so like Lady Whiteadder!
Trump will do whatever he wants to do in the meantime
Incredible.
My eldest was rather shocked, when I got her a fire extinguisher for the kitchen in the place she is renting for Uni.
Their views on Trans Trains are Unknown
Europe and Denmark will need to do a deal but I expect Trump will still want ownership
Sadly Trump has little to restrain him
Now we learn Tory MP @Geoffrey_Cox has been advising the Mauritian government!
The Tory party are treacherous liars and they cannot be trusted.
https://x.com/nigel_farage/status/2012630109170151603?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
A grubby little insinuation. Farage has no evidence I advise Mauritius on the Chagos Islands because I am not. And I voted against the Chagos deal. What a pity a man who could offer real leadership should vomit up the same stale brew of lies people are sick of.
https://x.com/geoffrey_cox/status/2012810505845387386?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Russia not winning in Ukraine is Wrong (and almost immoral) since Russia Stonk.
China is also seen as Strong.
Europe is seen as Weak.
So we need to think big. And think MAD.
Resume nuclear testing. And yet the largest yield ever. A four stager would be fun physics project.
Now testing on Pacific islands is problematic, these days.
Ariane 6 could (just) carry a 100 megaton device to LEO. Then dock a kick stage from a second launch to send it on an escape trajectory.
Nuke the moon.
If it’s 60% of over 55’s and 55% of the population as a whole then that 14.5% figure increases markedly.
It’s just BS plucked from the air from MAGA obsessives
I would never make my wife move to the Middle East and live in a gilded cage so it was a non-starters but the offers were up to 10x what I eventually took here.
(to be fair, older people are usually slightly more negative - what's changed recently is the direction of the trend)
Nothing in that substantiates the absurd claim 14.5% of the U.K. recycle MAGA talking point.
About 55% of U.K. residents are regular users of Facebook according to Dataportal and it is fewer on Twitter.
I don’t doubt some do but plucking an unsubstantiated figure out of the air to support one’s own personal prejudices is hardly evidence based .
The management hadn't found a way round it yet!
Now, they have already gone a huge distance in destroying the US interest, starting with burning down much of their international influence, and much of a system set up largely by them to promote and institutionalise US hegemony. That is now gone - what comes next? I think an underlying problem, in addition to Trump listening to voices in his head, is MAGA types like Vance and Miller, not understanding the USA's position.
I don't see any "jumping back into bed with EU"; I see Starmer looking, quite slowly, for an effective way of running Brexit and working with the EU - a promise on which the former Government(s) welched. I think most PBers agree that the Starmer Govt is too cautious, and in his desire to avoid the downside risks lsoign the upside too. They current Government were left with a pig in a poke, and whatever happens next, they start from there.
Do you have an approx link to the Liz Truss anecdote? The episode is good enough. There's a possible parallel with an anecdote told by Rory Tewart about his attempts to stop a particular programme in Afghanistan that he knew would be hijacked by Armed Groups, and his Civil Servants telling him that he did not have authority to stop programmes run by the department in which he was Minister. They both sound like a Sir Humprey problem.
In part it is viewing the economy through the prism of their politics, but also it must be that anyone under forty has only known a stagnant economy. Those who remember the boom and forget the busts of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties are all retired or nearly so, and looking back through their rose tinted specs.
When Supermac criticised selling off the family silver, there wasn't a Labour government.
I’m pessimistic for the global economy at the age of 60, due to that lunatic in the Whitehouse.
You invest, how are you feeling about it. I suspect this is the Trump playbook and it will work out and the market go up, especially as the fed gets more doveish. But you never know what this loon is going to do next.
Given this is the group with the highest disposable income (not saving for a house, often don't have a mortgage), considering this at least a contributory factor is perfectly reasonable, IMO. Anecdotally, my older relatives get a relentless stream of terror, economic or otherwise, from their phones and I spend much of my time trying to bring them back to reality.
I think you could make a strong case that the take-up of social media by older people has a pretty negative impact on the UK economy.
You could stick it for a couple of years and then retire early.
Roughly a third of the population (around 33%) holds some level of belief in specific, widespread conspiracy theories, such as the "Great Replacement Theory" or that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax.
Roughly 25% of the UK population believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
About 13% of the public think the 7/7 London bombings were a hoax.
Around 9% to 25% of UK adults believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated.
"15-Minute Cities": A significant number believe these urban planning concepts are actually a government surveillance ruse.
"Hardcore" Believers: A 2022 KCL study identified that a "hardcore" minority of about 9% (or one in 11) of the UK population strongly accept most or all of 11 surveyed conspiracy theories.
However, it’s not the oldies on Facebook so much as the youngsters on TikTok.
For example, 20% of under-35s believe in the Illuminati, compared to 8% of over-55s.
Belief is higher among those who rely on social media (specifically TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp) for news, as well as those who consume content from Telegram.
They live among us.
It started at about 20%, is now about 50%.
Perhaps I am too pessimistic, but the markets are looking rather peaky, and there is a pretty high chance of a major correction this year, perhaps the AI bubble popping, perhaps renewed trade war, perhaps China blockading Taiwan.
Now she’s fascinated by serial killer podcasts and pole dancing.
Many of those are not MAGA talking points just general conspiracy theories. The claim was specific to Reform voters and MAGA talking points.
I would not dispute about 15% of the population buy into conspiracy theories.
7/7 being hoax, or 9/11 being an inside job or the great replacement theory or 15 minute cities all predate MAGA.
I can't call that long term, but it looks like Canada's usual transactional model of managing tariffs - in contrast to a UK model.
If you set aside the individual elements - the domestic political violence and the international crisis - and look at them together the conclusion is simple: American democracy is over.
There is *no way on earth* Trump and his team can give up power now, or risk losing power, or cede even legal and constitutional points which try and restrict their power. If they do then they're going to jail forever.
What does that mean? They need to retain absolute power over Congress and the Supreme Court, and ensure that any elections held in November are guaranteed wins for them.
America *is over*. If Trump had no support then maybe they could oust him. But he still has popular support from enough people to muster armed militias to shoot his opponents. And that is all that is required.
And what does that mean? It doesn't matter whether America takes Greenland or not. The ultimatum is enough. We need to rapidly and decisively cut these fuckers out of NATO before further ultimatums are issued.
The first goal is the first manned landing on the Sun. By the entire DoE.
The House of Commons will take the first manned landing on Uranus.
Now, we have people bewailing so many of our companies and assets falling into foreign ownership whilst proselytising about the wonders of free trade as if the 2 were not sides of the same coin. Our children will live in a country where they are paying rent on so many of their domestic assets because we chose to import what we liked and were stupid enough to believe that this made us richer.
But Jan 6th did way more damage than the US accepted. The concept of accepting your opponent was allowed to win was undermined.
I also am mystified why you said I was upset when I was just discussing the point.
While many of the younger people seem to have given up on saving and planning and are living in the moment.
I mean, sure at 22 you are supposed to be feckless. But I see the same pattern in mid thirties people - no prospect of owning a home big enough for a family, working to pay the rent, no savings. No prospect of progressing from that. So why not live for the day?
The continuous trade deficit is something which began under Gordon Brown, aided by the media ceasing to report the trade balance.
Out here, with uniform tariffs on all car imports and no caps, the Chinese share has gone from almost nothing to seemingly half the new car market in under three years. They’re everywhere!
I guess it must have stopped around the time of the Single Market in 1992, when the methodology would have changed.
The recent explosion in the trade deficit is since China joined the WTO in 2001, shipping us increasing thousands of containers of cheap tat.
TSE, I saw some of the replies to your tweet last night, they are wild. Deepest darkest 'X' is not for the faint hearted
Way too many are in denial about this. Trump only has two ways to stay in power - a complete fascist takeover, or plunge the US into civil war and hope he can secure power over the MAGA leaning states. Whichever happens, our close relationship with the US is at an end, and as an (I suppose now former) atlantacist that is something I did not expect to ever be writing.
The GOP establishment chose not to convict Trump's impeachment as they didn't want to split the party and assumed that the Dems would bring Trump to justice.
The Dem establishment then chose not to bring Trump to justice as they thought a damaged Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat in 2028.
Well, how about food hygiene standards in restaurants? In general, the regulations are intelligible and not especially overlong. There is lots of enforcement, and the result is the simple hygiene rating that they display in the window.
It’s not perfect, but it works.
https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/uk-tariffs-china-cheap-electric-vehicles-nigel-farage
Alliances need to have the means to back up their commitments.
Got to say as a company purchase with all the tax breaks that having an EV offers it’s something I may well get
Farage is unburdened by thoughts of Net Zero targets, so can easily take the more protectionist route. The big one is the EU, which until recently has been pretty much self-sufficient in cars.
At the start of 2025 they swapped from being in the "EU quota" to the "non-EU quota", which caused problems.
That was one that neither BoJo or Fizzy Lizzy had sorted out.
Outside the quantity quota, tariffs are 275% .
One area where I have criticised Mr Starmer is on trade with Canada, which we should be able to address more under CPTPP, but of which I have not seen much evidence.
As I've said before for northern working class young men who want to learn a trade and own a home things have been good for a few years.
For the debt ridden, renting middle class southern young its a whole different experience.
It was made legal in the England in 1540 because Henry VIII wanted to marry the first cousin of a previous wife he had beheaded.
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/2012252464217518095
Suck air through teeth. "Oooh, I wouldn't do it like THAT....."
Meanwhile, here's a thing. You know Reform's candidate for London Mayor? Of course you don't. Turns out that she was the Conservative candidate who wasn't when they didn't stand anyone in Rotherham in 2024;
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/laila-cunningham-reform-uk-mayor-of-london-candidate?hide_intro_popup=true
(I have some sympathy; I wouldn't want to abandon my paying career to be a paper candidate in hopeless seat either. But that's showbiz. And it plays into the "Reform politicians are mostly failed, embittered Tories" thing.)
Or, indeed, why did they impeach him within a week of his attempt to seize power?
Or why did the Supreme Court feel the need to call in a decision from Washington DC and then sit on it for months, before delivering a verdict that revealed at least four justices are one of drugged, insane or corrupt? (Or indeed any combination thereof.)
And why, if they were not pursuing him, was he repeatedly found guilty of various crimes?
That Trump was at liberty and able to run again is a shocking indictment of the American justice system and how it doesn't apply to rich people. Not the Dems' unwillingness to prosecute.
The point about free trade is that it is a discipline. It requires the government to control consumption, to limit credit, not to boost demand by excessive fiscal deficits, and to encourage investment. If you do those things, as Germany did for many decades after WW2, then free trade can work very well for you creating wealth and encouraging efficiency. If you don't and simply live beyond your means as we have chosen to for the last 30 years it will eventually be disastrous. We are now at the point where this is having a serious impact on our standard of living.
Our 2 most recent PMs though, Sir Keir and Rishi, both got handed safe seats without ever standing for a non winnable seat or even for local council. Apparently their previous brilliant careers in finance and law meant they would automatically be brilliant political leaders and election campaigners, they weren't and it showed!
When Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, he had to obtain a papal dispensation because she had been married to his brother.
He claimed, in the dispensation, that Catherine and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. When he wanted an annulment, he claimed she had misled him on this point.
Similarly, he annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn before beheading her on the grounds he'd previously been shagging her sister Mary.
Yes, he was massively creepy.