TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
I’ve heard from a pretty good source that Starmer will resign after the local elections at the latest. He has concluded “he cannot continue”.
I’ve bet accordingly but DYOR.
PMs need to tough it out more.
less than 2 years less than 2 years less than 50 days just over 3 years just over 3 years
Is a pretty embarrassing return consider there were two with solid majorities in there. At least Rishi can accept that the public thought he was crap and kicked him out.
The Cabinet have so I understand completely lost confidence in him. They are helping to give him an out.
I now think it won’t be Burnham (at least this time around), however I think he will be into Parliament by the end of this year.
Reportedly the Cabinet united to stop Starmer from joining in to bomb Iran. It was said they were led into that by Miliband. So it's quite possible that Miliband is the Kingmaker.
Are we about to see Rayner as PM and Miliband as Chancellor?
How many times a day is Rayner pressuring/asking for an update from HMRC?
I think Miliband is value for the very reason that the Rayner/HMRC thing still hangs over her.
That doesn’t preclude her from playing kingmaker/coming back as Deputy PM + a great office though
Hasn't he already ruled himself out?
I don’t treat that as gospel. It’s very easy to row back from that kind of pronouncement.
He's looked really tired on his latest media rounds though, don't think he has it in him for **another** leadership bid.
Maybe. I could very much see him as the unity candidate though, depending on the field. We can’t ignore the fact he is very well thought of across the Labour Party, whereas others appeal more to certain parts of it.
I could imagine plenty of Labour MPs looking at Rayner, then Streeting, and then cornering Miliband to try and twist his arm into taking on the job.
He's yesterday's man, but that might sound appealing to many of them who preferred yesterday.
Off on a trip at the weekend. Looking forward to it
Partly because I have just been told the cost of the trip, WERE I paying (I am not paying)
Somewhere between £30,000-£35,000. For a week
Miami for the F1? Although for most it will be a lot more expensive than £35k.
I've been trying to work out if it is the single most expensive week long trip I've ever taken
Probably it is. I did the maiden voyage of the Greg Mortimer to Antarctica, with Antarctic sea kayaking led by the man who invented Antarctic sea-kayaying. That was about £20,000 back then and might be £30k now, but it's nearly two weeks
Private helicoptering around the Whitsundays? My personal safari right across Zambia with my own little aircraft at various points? The Oberoi-only jaunt across north India?
All insanely expensive, were I paying, but I still think this tops out. Wow
That someone is prepared to spend so much to keep you and your ignorant poisonous bile out of the country for a while might surprise the person on the Clapham omnibus, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to any regular PB’er.
That’s just unpleasant
Not just unpleasant, mildly humourous and unpleasant. If posters are happy to dish out unpleasantness themselves, then inevitably they get some back. And he can take it, he probably even prefers it to not getting a mention at all.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Sweeney74’s posts have exactly the same timbre as the reports two of the my team send me for review.
I don’t like to accuse anyone on PB of anything, and AI is often a useful tool. But my AI-dar is pinging. Something about the last paragraph in particular.
I’ve heard from a pretty good source that Starmer will resign after the local elections at the latest. He has concluded “he cannot continue”.
I’ve bet accordingly but DYOR.
PMs need to tough it out more.
less than 2 years less than 2 years less than 50 days just over 3 years just over 3 years
Is a pretty embarrassing return consider there were two with solid majorities in there. At least Rishi can accept that the public thought he was crap and kicked him out.
The Cabinet have so I understand completely lost confidence in him. They are helping to give him an out.
I now think it won’t be Burnham (at least this time around), however I think he will be into Parliament by the end of this year.
Reportedly the Cabinet united to stop Starmer from joining in to bomb Iran. It was said they were led into that by Miliband. So it's quite possible that Miliband is the Kingmaker.
Are we about to see Rayner as PM and Miliband as Chancellor?
How many times a day is Rayner pressuring/asking for an update from HMRC?
I think Miliband is value for the very reason that the Rayner/HMRC thing still hangs over her.
That doesn’t preclude her from playing kingmaker/coming back as Deputy PM + a great office though
Hasn't he already ruled himself out?
I don’t treat that as gospel. It’s very easy to row back from that kind of pronouncement.
He's looked really tired on his latest media rounds though, don't think he has it in him for **another** leadership bid.
Maybe. I could very much see him as the unity candidate though, depending on the field. We can’t ignore the fact he is very well thought of across the Labour Party, whereas others appeal more to certain parts of it.
I could imagine plenty of Labour MPs looking at Rayner, then Streeting, and then cornering Miliband to try and twist his arm into taking on the job.
He's yesterday's man, but that might sound appealing to many of them who preferred yesterday.
I see him in a similar position as Theresa May. OK, she had not been leader before. But in 2016 everyone was expecting Boris or Gove or a Brexiteer to seize power, and it became apparent that those candidates, at that time, were not able to demonstrate the necessary broad support. So the Tories went for what they thought (at that time) represented unity, stability and a fairly broad consensus. OK, it all ended in tears in relatively short order, but I can see how the Milibands of this world are well positioned in case of a vacancy.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I’ve heard from a pretty good source that Starmer will resign after the local elections at the latest. He has concluded “he cannot continue”.
I’ve bet accordingly but DYOR.
PMs need to tough it out more.
less than 2 years less than 2 years less than 50 days just over 3 years just over 3 years
Is a pretty embarrassing return consider there were two with solid majorities in there. At least Rishi can accept that the public thought he was crap and kicked him out.
The Cabinet have so I understand completely lost confidence in him. They are helping to give him an out.
I now think it won’t be Burnham (at least this time around), however I think he will be into Parliament by the end of this year.
Reportedly the Cabinet united to stop Starmer from joining in to bomb Iran. It was said they were led into that by Miliband. So it's quite possible that Miliband is the Kingmaker.
Are we about to see Rayner as PM and Miliband as Chancellor?
How many times a day is Rayner pressuring/asking for an update from HMRC?
I think Miliband is value for the very reason that the Rayner/HMRC thing still hangs over her.
That doesn’t preclude her from playing kingmaker/coming back as Deputy PM + a great office though
Hasn't he already ruled himself out?
I don’t treat that as gospel. It’s very easy to row back from that kind of pronouncement.
He's looked really tired on his latest media rounds though, don't think he has it in him for **another** leadership bid.
Maybe. I could very much see him as the unity candidate though, depending on the field. We can’t ignore the fact he is very well thought of across the Labour Party, whereas others appeal more to certain parts of it.
I could imagine plenty of Labour MPs looking at Rayner, then Streeting, and then cornering Miliband to try and twist his arm into taking on the job.
He's yesterday's man, but that might sound appealing to many of them who preferred yesterday.
I see him in a similar position as Theresa May. OK, she had not been leader before. But in 2016 everyone was expecting Boris or Gove or a Brexiteer to seize power, and it became apparent that those candidates, at that time, were not able to demonstrate the necessary broad support. So the Tories went for what they thought (at that time) represented unity, stability and a fairly broad consensus. OK, it all ended in tears in relatively short order, but I can see how the Milibands of this world are well positioned in case of a vacancy.
The Tory members would have chosen Loathsome ahead of May, if the former hadn't shot herself in the foot.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Sweeney74’s posts have exactly the same timbre as the reports two of the my team send me for review.
I don’t like to accuse anyone on PB of anything, and AI is often a useful tool. But my AI-dar is pinging. Something about the last paragraph in particular.
I know exactly what you mean, there are certain patterns that just repeatedly show up and scream of AI. My lest favourite is the that's not x that's y pattern that once you see, you can't mistake.
However, in this particular instance, you're just running into a mid-50's bloke who is guilty of over editing his own posts.
Who's internet history do you think these AI LLM models is built on?
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Sweeney74’s posts have exactly the same timbre as the reports two of the my team send me for review.
I don’t like to accuse anyone on PB of anything, and AI is often a useful tool. But my AI-dar is pinging. Something about the last paragraph in particular.
I know exactly what you mean, there are certain patterns that just repeatedly show up and scream of AI. My lest favourite is the that's not x that's y pattern that once you see, you can't mistake.
However, in this particular instance, you're just running into a mid-50's bloke who is guilty of over editing his own posts.
Who's internet history do you think these AI LLM models is built on?
Labour's rental law changes are good, overall. For the long term. But there seems to be little acknowledgement from them that, short term, tenants - sometimes of decades - are being turfed out.
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
Labour's rental law changes are good, overall. For the long term. But there seems to be little acknowledgement from them that, short term, tenants - sometimes of decades - are being turfed out.
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
There are some new problems. Tenants with savings but not income are going to be massively disadvantaged. The annual price increase system is inevitably going to fail, quickly and dramatically, effectively freezing rents - not sure that is in the medium/long term interest of anyone.
Labour's rental law changes are good, overall. For the long term. But there seems to be little acknowledgement from them that, short term, tenants - sometimes of decades - are being turfed out.
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
There are some new problems. Tenants with savings but not income are going to be massively disadvantaged. The annual price increase system is inevitably going to fail, quickly and dramatically, effectively freezing rents - not sure that is in the medium/long term interest of anyone.
As a self employed renter, I have always had to pay 6/12 months rent in advance on a new tenancy. If that won't work any more, it will be tiresome. I wouldn't relish having to ask a friend of family member to be my guarantor.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
Part of the problem is that Britain has a large stock of debt that continues to need to be refinanced. Even were a government able to cut the deficit to zero, if the interest rate on new bonds stays above 5%, then the debt interest bill will grow substantially, requiring further measures to balance the budget.
The country has to work hard against the gravity of the size of the existing debt burden.
Any new chancellor who replaces Rachel Reeves will have to work very hard to establish market confidence. It's a matter of tens of billions of pounds a year in extra debt interest in the long-term riding on it.
How do they do it? Everything seems sluggish and anaemic, and there's so many calls on the public purse.
Lots of ideas are bandied around on here, but the main thing is that they have to convince the voters that it's necessary. The pattern in recent budget speeches is to reel off a set of numbers of eye-watering sums of money to be borrowed, to claim that everything will be fine in five years time (but it never is) and then say that because the Chancellor is running things so well, they can afford to spend more money on the favoured interest group du jour.
So it would help if they were a bit more honest about the precarious fiscal situation Britain was in. It's hard for Labour to do that, because they weren't honest in opposition about how hard it would be to turn things around. It's hard for the Tories to do it, because they were in government for 14 years and bequeathed this situation to Labour, with huge national insurance tax cuts to demonstrate how deeply in denial they were. Reform don't want to do it, because they want to persuade everyone they will be able to spend more on their favoured interest groups while cutting taxes. The Greens don't want to do it because they want to persuade everyone that they will be able to spend a lot more with only some people paying higher taxes.
So that leaves the Lib Dems. I don't know why they aren't doing it. I guess they rather like the experience of having more than a dozen MPs, and don't want to be wiped out again at the next election by trying to tell the public the truth.
There is no fiscal prudence party, let alone two flavours of fiscal prudence parties so that we can choose what variety of fiscal prudence we favour.
This is typically where the Conservatives would dive in but no spending-based fiscal prudence is credible without abolishing the triple lock and freezing health spending.
And their voters are pensioners.
As far as the LDs are concerned, Davey knows full well it's three years till the next election and he is (I think) playing the longer game and allowing Reform and the Greens to enjoy their moments in the sun and implode when their internal contradictions allow.
I do agree there's more honesty required but how much honesty will the electorate accept and does it have the same impact when some parties are trying to be honest and others aren't?
We come back to the central problem - everyone might agree the borrowing is a problem and "something" needs to be done but they don't want to be the ones who are negatively impacted by the "something" though they are happy for everyone else to have the pain.
People will accept pain more readily if everyone else is hurting and that's probably the only answer - plenty of pain and spread it around so tax rises, spending cuts, abolition of the triple lock, etc, etc. The more anyone sees everyone else is hurting as much as they are, the more willing they are to understand the pain.
The other side of this, however, is there has to be some positive from the pain and that has to be a perception the pain we endure now will benefit future generations -people will suffer a lot for the future, they won't forthe present.
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Labour's rental law changes are good, overall. For the long term. But there seems to be little acknowledgement from them that, short term, tenants - sometimes of decades - are being turfed out.
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
There are some new problems. Tenants with savings but not income are going to be massively disadvantaged. The annual price increase system is inevitably going to fail, quickly and dramatically, effectively freezing rents - not sure that is in the medium/long term interest of anyone.
The ONS look to be doing some tracking so in the medium term we should know if a chunk of properties move from private rental > owner occupied.
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Then I went away
Now I'm back
I think it was early 2009 or late 2008 when I discovered PB. No idea how it came to my attention. but glad it did. Getting on for 20 years, good heavens. It makes election nights for me - I can go to bed at as normal & every time I wake up (which is often) all the latest is there for me.
Labour's rental law changes are good, overall. For the long term. But there seems to be little acknowledgement from them that, short term, tenants - sometimes of decades - are being turfed out.
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
There are some new problems. Tenants with savings but not income are going to be massively disadvantaged. The annual price increase system is inevitably going to fail, quickly and dramatically, effectively freezing rents - not sure that is in the medium/long term interest of anyone.
As a self employed renter, I have always had to pay 6/12 months rent in advance on a new tenancy. If that won't work any more, it will be tiresome. I wouldn't relish having to ask a friend of family member to be my guarantor.
Advance payment can't be contractual under the new rules aiui. So you could do it voluntarily, but a tenant committing to doing so wouldn't be under any obligation to do so.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Then I went away
Now I'm back
Were you here for disqus?
Ah yes, the great Disqus debacle of... 2012?
March 2013.
When they announced they were moving from linear comments to nested comments with about 4 hours notice.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Then I went away
Now I'm back
Were you here for disqus?
Ah yes, the great Disqus debacle of... 2012?
March 2013.
When they announced they were moving from linear comments to nested comments with about 4 hours notice.
Never have I felt under such pressure by the PB community!
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, deploying Vanilla in response to the absolute fury of the board,
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
It will limit the pool of possibles.
And then the press will start getting vicious...
One of the problems for Polanski is that it (or the antisemitism issue) will be the first question every journalist wants to ask him. So he will struggle to communicate any other message.
It then doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong on the substantive issue, because he will become known as the politician only interested in arguing the precise definition of antisemitism or relative rape risk from asylum seekers.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
It will limit the pool of possibles.
And then the press will start getting vicious...
One of the problems for Polanski is that it (or the antisemitism issue) will be the first question every journalist wants to ask him. So he will struggle to communicate any other message.
It then doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong on the substantive issue, because he will become known as the politician only interested in arguing the precise definition of antisemitism or relative rape risk from asylum seekers.
And boob hypnosis.
Cheap shot, sure, but it is titanically stupid and he's already tried to pretend he never believed it but the BBC proved that to be a lie.
It was all long ago and now is more important, but he needs a better defence than getting pissy that people bring it up, he needs to laugh at himself a little when apologising.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
Fundamental flaw in your first point. It is possible to increase the tax take by taking money from people like me, and you probably, who frankly have more of it than they are ever likely to spend in their lifetime. It wouldn't be coming out of their pockets but their ISAs and other savings.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
To be conciliatory and thanks for the cogent and articulate response,you're not wrong.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
It will limit the pool of possibles.
And then the press will start getting vicious...
One of the problems for Polanski is that it (or the antisemitism issue) will be the first question every journalist wants to ask him. So he will struggle to communicate any other message.
It then doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong on the substantive issue, because he will become known as the politician only interested in arguing the precise definition of antisemitism or relative rape risk from asylum seekers.
And boob hypnosis.
Cheap shot, sure, but it is titanically stupid and he's already tried to pretend he never believed it but the BBC proved that to be a lie.
It was all long ago and now is more important, but he needs a better defence than getting pissy that people bring it up, he needs to laugh at himself a little when apologising.
So in summary, you think he should admit to being a bit of a tit when younger?
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
Former Scottish Labour leader and new Stonewall chair Kezia Dugdale has issued an apology after saying she had “respect” for JK Rowling.
Ironically given my opinion of JKR, I have to say what I usually say in these circs: Never explain, never apologise. Initial remarks piss off some people on one side, but the apology doesn't mollify them but pisses off the people on the other side, and now you have two problems. If you wait without apologising people eventually forget (yes I know it's a long time these days, but still)
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
The economy may suffer slightly in the short term as income is redistributed to groups with a higher propensity to save (though the extent to which this is true is often exaggerated).
But allowing the enterprising and productive to keep more of their own money is not only morally right, it also benefits the economy hugely in the long run, as distortions to incentives are removed, savings and investment increase, wealth creation is rewarded and scroungers are encouraged to train and work for their money instead of being given it for doing nothing, or otherwise being unproductive.
That's why the vast majority of studies of the question show that reducing tax and spend increases long run economic growth significantly.
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Then I went away
Now I'm back
Were you here for disqus?
Ah yes, the great Disqus debacle of... 2012?
March 2013.
When they announced they were moving from linear comments to nested comments with about 4 hours notice.
Never have I felt under such pressure by the PB community!
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, deploying Vanilla in response to the absolute fury of the board,
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
Very off-topic, but for any geeks - you might enjoy this (no idea why YT decided to show it to me right now - but whatever). I do like that the office documents open quicker than they do on my current Mac with 16gb ram, ssd and multi-gigahertz CPU :
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
Do w3w locations cover height? As in blocks of flats?
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
The economy may suffer slightly in the short term as income is redistributed to groups with a higher propensity to save (though the extent to which this is true is often exaggerated).
But allowing the enterprising and productive to keep more of their own money is not only morally right, it also benefits the economy hugely in the long run, as distortions to incentives are removed, savings and investment increase, wealth creation is rewarded and scroungers are encouraged to train and work for their money instead of being given it for doing nothing, or otherwise being unproductive.
That's why the vast majority of studies of the question show that reducing tax and spend increases long run economic growth significantly.
Vast majority? The literature is pretty mixed, particularly on tax cuts. It’s at least as speculative as a spending multiplier.
And even if what you say is true, I’m not sure many people who live in Nordic countries would swap their living conditions for American-style growth. And that’s before you deploy the veil of ignorance.
I also don’t think it’s “morally right” for a small majority to enjoy all the returns from a working population - and that’s deeply dangerous territory for the rich anyway. There needs to be an incentive for everyone to engage in the economy; if 50% of your net salary goes on rent, and you need UC to make ends meet, frankly you’re entirely justified to burn the whole thing down.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
Fundamental flaw in your first point. It is possible to increase the tax take by taking money from people like me, and you probably, who frankly have more of it than they are ever likely to spend in their lifetime. It wouldn't be coming out of their pockets but their ISAs and other savings.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
The alternative is to get the economy moving! Those times in the past when the UK was running a surplus, it was because the economy was thriving.
Go back to my example. If people are feeling richer, then that coffee shop hires a new barista - that's one person off the welfare rolls, and now they're paying income tax. The government's deficit has just shrunk.
If you want to shrink the deficit, then how about we start freeing up the building and planning system? That will simultaneously cause an increase in employment, and will also make housing more affordable (which means that people can afford to spend more money at that coffee shop again.)
The BBC and ITV have ordered Labour to tone down its party political broadcast after deeming it too offensive
The ad contained remarks from Reform UK figures including a former council leader who called London a "third world s---hole" run by a "narcissistic Pakistani" https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2047056720019485170
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
Why should women and girls have to take the risk of sexual assault from men from different cultures arriving here in unorthodox ways because governments seem incapable of having effective borders or dealing with the arrivals when they are here?
The violence against women and girls is endemic. It comes from men. We are not dealing with the problems we already have from men in this country and there is no reason at all why women and girls should be subjected to even more of it. Any migrant who sexually assaults a woman should, IMO, be automatically deported at the end of their sentence and not be eligible for any sort of asylum here. I don't give a flying fuck if he'll have a difficult time in wherever he comes from. Tough.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
Why should women and girls have to take the risk of sexual assault from men from different cultures arriving here in unorthodox ways because governments seem incapable of having effective borders or dealing with the arrivals when they are here?
The violence against women and girls is endemic. It comes from men. We are not dealing with the problems we already have from men in this country and there is no reason at all why women and girls should be subjected to even more of it. Any migrant who sexually assaults a woman should, IMO, be automatically deported at the end of their sentence and not be eligible for any sort of asylum here. I don't give a flying fuck if he'll have a difficult time in wherever he comes from. Tough.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
My brother lives in a place which isn't great, but the landlord hasn't raised his rent in 6 years so he's more than happy to stay given cost pressures. No idea why the landlord is not bothering.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
The economy may suffer slightly in the short term as income is redistributed to groups with a higher propensity to save (though the extent to which this is true is often exaggerated).
But allowing the enterprising and productive to keep more of their own money is not only morally right, it also benefits the economy hugely in the long run, as distortions to incentives are removed, savings and investment increase, wealth creation is rewarded and scroungers are encouraged to train and work for their money instead of being given it for doing nothing, or otherwise being unproductive.
That's why the vast majority of studies of the question show that reducing tax and spend increases long run economic growth significantly.
You lost me at your use of 'scroungers' for those on benefits I'm afraid.
Fantastic idea though, to encourage them to 'train and work for their money' Only somebody who is totally clueless about the benefit system could imagine this does not happen already.
I stumbled upon it on the morning following the 2006 mid terms, when the site was full of people who had backed the reps licking their wounds.
Didn't create an account until the run up to the 2015 general electron, when I learned the folly of arguing with Rod Crossby.
After that I mislaid my account a few times (this is my third or fourth I think), but I have lurked here almost every day, posting almost not at all, for very nearly 20 years. What a nerd....
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
I have, for 3 years. But I deeply dislike that kind of argument- perfectly legitimate for me to oppose the current system while optimising my personal use of it. Almost everything I argue for on here would damage my personal finances.
On that note an idea: ban letting agents.
It’s a complete pain in the arse to find new, good tenant, so I’m pretty desperate to retain mine. If they sent an email this evening demanding a £100 cut to rent I’d probably concede because I’d rather sit here with my 7% IPA than start fishing for a new one - and a very low chance I find someone with such low drama.
But the incentives are entirely perverted for agents. They make their cash from constant repairs, constant advertising. For me these are things to avoid like the plague.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
My brother lives in a place which isn't great, but the landlord hasn't raised his rent in 6 years so he's more than happy to stay given cost pressures. No idea why the landlord is not bothering.
Plenty of private landlords effectively freeze their tenants rent for years - especially if the tenant is no trouble, pays the rent on time and looks after the property, etc. Unfortunately though those landlords are still in the minority.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
Why should women and girls have to take the risk of sexual assault from men from different cultures arriving here in unorthodox ways because governments seem incapable of having effective borders or dealing with the arrivals when they are here?
The violence against women and girls is endemic. It comes from men. We are not dealing with the problems we already have from men in this country and there is no reason at all why women and girls should be subjected to even more of it. Any migrant who sexually assaults a woman should, IMO, be automatically deported at the end of their sentence and not be eligible for any sort of asylum here. I don't give a flying fuck if he'll have a difficult time in wherever he comes from. Tough.
This is so straightforward it’s a bit frightening you felt the need to post that comment.
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
To be conciliatory and thanks for the cogent and articulate response,you're not wrong.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
I am uncomfortable with what British emigrants did to the people who were already living in North America, Australia and elsewhere when they moved there, and as an emigrant to Ireland I am aware that I'm living in a foreign country. It's a very different thing for my Irish wife to moan about the road bowlers then it is for me to do the same (though I think I'm actually a lot less bothered by it than she is).
So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to accommodate themselves to their new country to an extent.
But, well, I think I actually would vote for Irish Union with Britain, and if there was a party for Irish Unionists in the Republic - and they weren't bigots - then I'd consider giving them my vote, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Does that mean Ireland should put a hard limit on the number of immigrants from Britain to stop British immigrants from voting for Union with Britain? That sort of curb on front is anathema to me.
The details of the 1926 Irish census were recently published by the National Archives and are now web searchable. They seem to have done a really good job of digitising it all. From the previous censuses of 1901 and 1911, I can see the number of people with my English birth surname increasing. Then, in 1926, after the war of independence, the formation of the new state, and the civil war, I can see that the number of people with my surname decreases by 83%.
When issues of identity come to the fore then politics can quickly turn ugly and people's lives get changed for the worse. Maybe I'd be best not voting for British Unionism and leaving the status quo as it is.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
A female rape victim is uniquely distrusted as a victim of crime. I don't think the word of a victim is so readily discarded in the case of other crimes.
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
Do w3w locations cover height? As in blocks of flats?
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
A female rape victim is uniquely distrusted as a victim of crime. I don't think the word of a victim is so readily discarded in the case of other crimes.
That may be so, but if the man says one thing and the woman another how do you prove who is lying? Perhaps we all need to sign consent forms before sex.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
Fundamental flaw in your first point. It is possible to increase the tax take by taking money from people like me, and you probably, who frankly have more of it than they are ever likely to spend in their lifetime. It wouldn't be coming out of their pockets but their ISAs and other savings.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
The alternative is to get the economy moving! Those times in the past when the UK was running a surplus, it was because the economy was thriving.
Go back to my example. If people are feeling richer, then that coffee shop hires a new barista - that's one person off the welfare rolls, and now they're paying income tax. The government's deficit has just shrunk.
If you want to shrink the deficit, then how about we start freeing up the building and planning system? That will simultaneously cause an increase in employment, and will also make housing more affordable (which means that people can afford to spend more money at that coffee shop again.)
I don't disagree with any of that but these are not alternatives, we could do both: get the economy moving and cut the deficit by taxing the wealthy. (At least we could attempt both - no government seems very good at 'getting the economy moving'.)
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
I have, for 3 years. But I deeply dislike that kind of argument- perfectly legitimate for me to oppose the current system while optimising my personal use of it. Almost everything I argue for on here would damage my personal finances.
On that note an idea: ban letting agents.
It’s a complete pain in the arse to find new, good tenant, so I’m pretty desperate to retain mine. If they sent an email this evening demanding a £100 cut to rent I’d probably concede because I’d rather sit here with my 7% IPA than start fishing for a new one - and a very low chance I find someone with such low drama.
But the incentives are entirely perverted for agents. They make their cash from constant repairs, constant advertising. For me these are things to avoid like the plague.
Letting agents, much like employment agents, --insert service-- agents, exist because there is an economy of scale. They aggregate demand and supply, standardise the boring bits, and absorb the hassle. They are valuable enough for people and organisations to pay for the service.
There is no fundamental reason why you should employ one if that's how you feel about them.
I know bugger all about w3w, but I presumed it was clever in some ways that there was error code correction built in as in if you mispell a word by one wrong character. That would be quite sensible then, you have distilled a location to 3 words and also you can slightly bugger up a word and the system still predicts the correct location (which when in a panic, is what you want).
Is it literally they mapped the world and stuck 3 random words for each square. Surely there has to be more to it?
The BBC and ITV have ordered Labour to tone down its party political broadcast after deeming it too offensive
The ad contained remarks from Reform UK figures including a former council leader who called London a "third world s---hole" run by a "narcissistic Pakistani" https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2047056720019485170
But you'll be able to view the full uncensored version here:
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
Any large group of men is very likely to contain a significant proportion of rapists. Perhaps it would be safer to ban the immigration of any men at all, but I think that would be a step too far. It's still a big deal though.
The BBC and ITV have ordered Labour to tone down its party political broadcast after deeming it too offensive
The ad contained remarks from Reform UK figures including a former council leader who called London a "third world s---hole" run by a "narcissistic Pakistani" https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2047056720019485170
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
Do w3w locations cover height? As in blocks of flats?
No. That would be what4words
Or use what5words if you also need to specify the time
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
Any large group of men is very likely to contain a significant proportion of rapists. Perhaps it would be safer to ban the immigration of any men at all, but I think that would be a step too far. It's still a big deal though.
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
Do w3w locations cover height? As in blocks of flats?
No. That would be what4words
Or use what5words if you also need to specify the time
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
People who vote Green are probably the sort of people who would point out that the people you ate calling illegal immigrants are not illegal. They'd probably say that your erroneous use of the term suggests you're not exactly unbiased
TBH I can't recall the exact circumstances when I first encountered PB. Well before the switchover to vanilla forums/Wordpress. I recall a few election night IRC sessions, but for the life of me I can't recall which GE.
I do recall PB Tories being a thing, Tim, SeanT and many more
Then I went away
Now I'm back
Were you here for disqus?
Ah yes, the great Disqus debacle of... 2012?
March 2013.
When they announced they were moving from linear comments to nested comments with about 4 hours notice.
Never have I felt under such pressure by the PB community!
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, deploying Vanilla in response to the absolute fury of the board,
We are extremely demanding in getting what we want for our subscription fees...
Robbins refused to co-operate with the humble address.
How is it that UKSV were happy to pass the documents to Little if as Robbins maintained there were strict rules stopping him from doing this .
And you’re allowed to pass them across for exceptional circumstances. He seemed to ignore the Mandelson drama and sat on his hands whilst the PM was giving interview after interview .
Commentators seem to want to conflate two separate issues and ignore what the evidence so far has supported. Starmer did not lie to the Commons and Robbins was very uncooperative.
No one disputes Starmer made a disastrous mistake in appointing Mandelson but the matter at hand is if he lied to the commons .
My guess is that Robbins cocked up and tried to bury it.
He assumed the vetting was a pointless formality anyway given Mandelson already appointed and was previously a minister and overruled the UKSV assuming no one would ever know.
Then when it all went wrong he tried to argue the report was too confidential for anyone to see.
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
To be conciliatory and thanks for the cogent and articulate response,you're not wrong.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
I am uncomfortable with what British emigrants did to the people who were already living in North America, Australia and elsewhere when they moved there, and as an emigrant to Ireland I am aware that I'm living in a foreign country. It's a very different thing for my Irish wife to moan about the road bowlers then it is for me to do the same (though I think I'm actually a lot less bothered by it than she is).
So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to accommodate themselves to their new country to an extent.
But, well, I think I actually would vote for Irish Union with Britain, and if there was a party for Irish Unionists in the Republic - and they weren't bigots - then I'd consider giving them my vote, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Does that mean Ireland should put a hard limit on the number of immigrants from Britain to stop British immigrants from voting for Union with Britain? That sort of curb on front is anathema to me.
The details of the 1926 Irish census were recently published by the National Archives and are now web searchable. They seem to have done a really good job of digitising it all. From the previous censuses of 1901 and 1911, I can see the number of people with my English birth surname increasing. Then, in 1926, after the war of independence, the formation of the new state, and the civil war, I can see that the number of people with my surname decreases by 83%.
When issues of identity come to the fore then politics can quickly turn ugly and people's lives get changed for the worse. Maybe I'd be best not voting for British Unionism and leaving the status quo as it is.
I confess I've not given the situation with Ireland much thought. My father's ancestor came to England from County Mayo but I've only been to Ireland once.
I've always thought the only way there would ever be a United Ireland is if and when the south gave the north an offer it couldn't refuse - if it got to the point when the south was clearly wealthier than the north, the north might be tempted. It hasn't happened yet but it might one day.
I've also thought there was more chance of London seeking to break from the rest of the UK but that'll get one or two on here over-excited at the notion of a Singapore-on-Thames type mini-state.
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
There are approximately 1.8 million post codes. They're are slightly more than 27 billion what three words squares in the UK. So there's an average of about 15,000 what three words squares per post code.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. There has been a historic, and possibly ongoing issue with paedophile gangs in certain Asian populations across the country, cynicall6 targeting young, often troubled white girls. There are also very many white paedophiles. Are asylum seeking young men from a different culture more likely to be rapists than British born men? No idea. But there are some high profile cases that suggest on facile view that they are, but that’s quite likely down to selective reporting.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
A female rape victim is uniquely distrusted as a victim of crime. I don't think the word of a victim is so readily discarded in the case of other crimes.
That may be so, but if the man says one thing and the woman another how do you prove who is lying? Perhaps we all need to sign consent forms before sex.
Indeed, with a gang rape it's her word against a number of others'.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
People who vote Green are probably the sort of people who would point out that the people you ate calling illegal immigrants are not illegal. They'd probably say that your erroneous use of the term suggests you're not exactly unbiased
Given a fair few of them are vegan, they will probably also be against eating people too.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
Fundamental flaw in your first point. It is possible to increase the tax take by taking money from people like me, and you probably, who frankly have more of it than they are ever likely to spend in their lifetime. It wouldn't be coming out of their pockets but their ISAs and other savings.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
The alternative is to get the economy moving! Those times in the past when the UK was running a surplus, it was because the economy was thriving.
Go back to my example. If people are feeling richer, then that coffee shop hires a new barista - that's one person off the welfare rolls, and now they're paying income tax. The government's deficit has just shrunk.
If you want to shrink the deficit, then how about we start freeing up the building and planning system? That will simultaneously cause an increase in employment, and will also make housing more affordable (which means that people can afford to spend more money at that coffee shop again.)
You have to make sure that most of the population benefits from growth. Recent experience hasn't felt like that. If the benefits accrue to a minority then what's the point?
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
To be conciliatory and thanks for the cogent and articulate response,you're not wrong.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
I am uncomfortable with what British emigrants did to the people who were already living in North America, Australia and elsewhere when they moved there, and as an emigrant to Ireland I am aware that I'm living in a foreign country. It's a very different thing for my Irish wife to moan about the road bowlers then it is for me to do the same (though I think I'm actually a lot less bothered by it than she is).
So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to accommodate themselves to their new country to an extent.
But, well, I think I actually would vote for Irish Union with Britain, and if there was a party for Irish Unionists in the Republic - and they weren't bigots - then I'd consider giving them my vote, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Does that mean Ireland should put a hard limit on the number of immigrants from Britain to stop British immigrants from voting for Union with Britain? That sort of curb on front is anathema to me.
The details of the 1926 Irish census were recently published by the National Archives and are now web searchable. They seem to have done a really good job of digitising it all. From the previous censuses of 1901 and 1911, I can see the number of people with my English birth surname increasing. Then, in 1926, after the war of independence, the formation of the new state, and the civil war, I can see that the number of people with my surname decreases by 83%.
When issues of identity come to the fore then politics can quickly turn ugly and people's lives get changed for the worse. Maybe I'd be best not voting for British Unionism and leaving the status quo as it is.
I confess I've not given the situation with Ireland much thought. My father's ancestor came to England from County Mayo but I've only been to Ireland once.
I've always thought the only way there would ever be a United Ireland is if and when the south gave the north an offer it couldn't refuse - if it got to the point when the south was clearly wealthier than the north, the north might be tempted. It hasn't happened yet but it might one day.
I've also thought there was more chance of London seeking to break from the rest of the UK but that'll get one or two on here over-excited at the notion of a Singapore-on-Thames type mini-state.
Why is it your father's ancestor rather than yours?
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
There are approximately 1.8 million post codes. They're are slightly more than 27 billion what three words squares in the UK. So there's an average of about 15,000 what three words squares per post code.
They seem to have spent a hell of a lot of (other people's) money doing this. You'd think a simple iterative program linking three random words to a defined succession of location points would do it all for you. I could almost write it myself in BBC Basic but cba.
What3words running a secondary sale in an 80% down round is absolutely criminal This company has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and in the last year generated £2m of revenue. It's doing a crowdfund and a secondary sale valuing the company at £50m way down from its heights. £50m on £2m of revenue for a company that is 11 years old is still massively over valued.
Who could have predicted What.Three.Words was a load of shite?
It’s not shite. It’s a good app. Just no way to monetise it
If its use became widespread, you could charge people to change the words of their location, like a personalised numberplate.
That was very much the business model: get corporates to get vanity codes for their headquarters. So, Amazon would be at the.everything.store, etc.
Unfortunately, that required lots of people to use the three word codes. Which simply hasn't happened.
It should have taken the place of postcodes, as they are so much more specific.
w3w addresses are far too specific to replace postcodes. There are 390 separate w3w squares on our plot alone and I would guess a 1000 times as many in our, not particularly large postcode.
There are approximately 1.8 million post codes. They're are slightly more than 27 billion what three words squares in the UK. So there's an average of about 15,000 what three words squares per post code.
They seem to have spent a hell of a lot of (other people's) money doing this. You'd think a simple iterative program linking three random words to a defined succession of location points would do it all for you. I could almost write it myself in BBC Basic but cba.
The thing I’ve never understood is, haven’t they already covered the entire planet?
Their R&D budget can’t be very high. And server costs don’t explain their other costs. Nor does headcount.
How does 'tax and spend' tank the pound? Spend and not tax (à la Truss) would tank the pound; tax and spend has not tanked the euro.
You have to consider what would be taxed and what would be spent.
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
I do take your point (though we could have a long argument on what is actually wealth creation and what is simply wealth accumulation).
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
A very large chunk of UC goes straight into the pocket of landlords. I’m instinctively with you but this gets complicated, quickly.
Well that's another issue that needs resolving. I'd opt for swingeing rent controls personally. A rent freeze on private lettings.
I think I’m professionally obliged to oppose that. But it certainly shouldn’t be the case that someone like me finds being an “accidental” landlord so lucrative.
you don't need legislation to freeze your tenant's rent, if that's how you feel.
I have, for 3 years. But I deeply dislike that kind of argument- perfectly legitimate for me to oppose the current system while optimising my personal use of it. Almost everything I argue for on here would damage my personal finances.
On that note an idea: ban letting agents.
It’s a complete pain in the arse to find new, good tenant, so I’m pretty desperate to retain mine. If they sent an email this evening demanding a £100 cut to rent I’d probably concede because I’d rather sit here with my 7% IPA than start fishing for a new one - and a very low chance I find someone with such low drama.
But the incentives are entirely perverted for agents. They make their cash from constant repairs, constant advertising. For me these are things to avoid like the plague.
Maybe landlords should consider offering their letting agent a bonus for each extra year a tenant stays and they avoid having to find a new one? They could change the incentives.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
Any large group of men is very likely to contain a significant proportion of rapists. Perhaps it would be safer to ban the immigration of any men at all, but I think that would be a step too far. It's still a big deal though.
Let’s be honest - even if we controlled for all the necessary factors like age, poverty, lack of close family, I think you’re still going to find a higher incidence.
We have all grown up in a (relatively) tolerant, respectful, rich country. We shouldn’t forget that most of the rest of the world isn’t so lucky, particularly for those young men making the journey across the channel. Even if it’s a small minority, that’s going to be a larger proportion than those here already.
I think a full ban and permanent disqualification for illegal entry is necessary, even for children. But a carrot too - if you’re the young parents of children escaping a war, you’ve got a great chance of approval if you present at a refugee camp or UK embassy.
UK 10 year old gilt at 5.197 already. Add anything more to that for Rayner and borrowing at all will be ruinously expensive requiring savage cuts in the deficit, either by huge tax increases or big spending cuts or both.
In some ways this might be a good thing. We cannot keep adding to our debt mountain like this. But I can't help feeling that a Rayner government might fall apart facing such choices.
I very much doubt huge tax increases will cut the deficit and I'd guess more importantly so does the gilt market. If any chancellor tried it the result would be a Chernobyl to make Kwasi's efforts look like a bin fire.
Why do you think the UK couldn't stand a tax take of say 43-44% GDP like France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark? That would amount to an additional 5% GDP which would wipe out the deficit at a stroke.
I appreciate it would be painful medicine but it's a perfectly achievable solution.
You can get to 43–44% of GDP in tax. Plenty of countries sit there. The small detail is they didn’t do it by whacking on an extra ~£130bn in one go.
That’s the scale being waved around here. You’re into big hikes across income tax, NICs, VAT, property, probably all of the above, on top of a tax burden that’s already at modern highs.
Those European models were built over decades with a different political settlement and a lot more buy-in for what the state does. Trying to jump there quickly in the UK runs into the obvious problems: people change behaviour, revenues don’t come in cleanly, and MPs start eyeing the exits.
And the gilt market isn’t just doing the maths. It’s asking whether any of this is credible and survives first contact with voters.
Nice neat answer on paper. In practice it’s a very fast way to discover how elastic both the economy and your majority really are.
'In practice' you have no idea what would happen because it's not been tried. Too much tired thinking on here that equates to "more tax - bad". If you want to cut the deficit forget 'efficiency' savings, forget cutting health, public services or benefits, the only way is more taxes.
Here's the thing:
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
Fundamental flaw in your first point. It is possible to increase the tax take by taking money from people like me, and you probably, who frankly have more of it than they are ever likely to spend in their lifetime. It wouldn't be coming out of their pockets but their ISAs and other savings.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
The alternative is to get the economy moving! Those times in the past when the UK was running a surplus, it was because the economy was thriving.
Go back to my example. If people are feeling richer, then that coffee shop hires a new barista - that's one person off the welfare rolls, and now they're paying income tax. The government's deficit has just shrunk.
If you want to shrink the deficit, then how about we start freeing up the building and planning system? That will simultaneously cause an increase in employment, and will also make housing more affordable (which means that people can afford to spend more money at that coffee shop again.)
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
The reality is that men commit essentially all violent crime, and the majority of non-violent crime too.
It's not clear at all why we allow any men to emigrate to the UK.
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
It will limit the pool of possibles.
And then the press will start getting vicious...
As the only progressive option 100 MPs is a realistic target imo
I know bugger all about w3w, but I presumed it was clever in some ways that there was error code correction built in as in if you mispell a word by one wrong character. That would be quite sensible then, you have distilled a location to 3 words and also you can slightly bugger up a word and the system still predicts the correct location (which when in a panic, is what you want).
Is it literally they mapped the world and stuck 3 random words for each square. Surely there has to be more to it?
Because the world is an oblate spheroid they will have had to do something to bodge a change in the number of squares in as you move towards the poles. I haven't looked closely enough to work out what they did about that.
It does seem as though they weren't very careful about their choice of words, which means small typos, or mistakes of communication, are not well-handled.
Yes, you'd expect the rate to go down by a lot if a Chancellor was able to pass the many unpopular measures required to balance the budget. There'd be a serious increase in fiscal credibility as a result. And then we'd likely be in a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to lower borrowing costs, reducing the debt interest bill, further improving the fiscal balance.
I guess it's the present situation where, because recent Chancellors have failed to get ahead of things (with the stupid balance the budget in year five rule), that they're actually having to work hard just to keep still.
I suppose there might be some long term doubts about the UK's fiscal health until there was long term evidence that the economy was strong enough to cope with the demographic headwinds, and that fiscal prudence politics would survive general elections.
I rarely take umbrage with other contributors but I'm calling you out on your pop at me from this morning.
I don't like discrimination but it exists and pretending somehow it doesn't and never has is naive.
The other side of this in terms of property is to ask whether any landlord or property owner has the right to say who they have in their property. There's a fair point if this were public property, any discrimination would be unreasonable but when it's a private tenancy, does not the landlord/owner have the right to refuse to rent to someone with whom he or she would prefer not to deal?
The question then becomes as to the basis of discrimination and whether it is implicit or explicit.
I'd prefer there to be no discrimination and for there to be much greater tolerance of all religions but you can't create tolerance via intolerance - the best hope is education but even that isn't foolproof and as we know, people like people like themselves which in itself makes multi-culturalism problematic at best.
I'm in favour of discrimination - i.e. of people choosing based on the evidence in front of them - and I'm against discrimination - i.e. of people choosing on the basis of assumptions about labels and identity.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
To be conciliatory and thanks for the cogent and articulate response,you're not wrong.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
I am uncomfortable with what British emigrants did to the people who were already living in North America, Australia and elsewhere when they moved there, and as an emigrant to Ireland I am aware that I'm living in a foreign country. It's a very different thing for my Irish wife to moan about the road bowlers then it is for me to do the same (though I think I'm actually a lot less bothered by it than she is).
So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to accommodate themselves to their new country to an extent.
But, well, I think I actually would vote for Irish Union with Britain, and if there was a party for Irish Unionists in the Republic - and they weren't bigots - then I'd consider giving them my vote, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Does that mean Ireland should put a hard limit on the number of immigrants from Britain to stop British immigrants from voting for Union with Britain? That sort of curb on front is anathema to me.
The details of the 1926 Irish census were recently published by the National Archives and are now web searchable. They seem to have done a really good job of digitising it all. From the previous censuses of 1901 and 1911, I can see the number of people with my English birth surname increasing. Then, in 1926, after the war of independence, the formation of the new state, and the civil war, I can see that the number of people with my surname decreases by 83%.
When issues of identity come to the fore then politics can quickly turn ugly and people's lives get changed for the worse. Maybe I'd be best not voting for British Unionism and leaving the status quo as it is.
I confess I've not given the situation with Ireland much thought. My father's ancestor came to England from County Mayo but I've only been to Ireland once.
I've always thought the only way there would ever be a United Ireland is if and when the south gave the north an offer it couldn't refuse - if it got to the point when the south was clearly wealthier than the north, the north might be tempted. It hasn't happened yet but it might one day.
I've also thought there was more chance of London seeking to break from the rest of the UK but that'll get one or two on here over-excited at the notion of a Singapore-on-Thames type mini-state.
Why is it your father's ancestor rather than yours?
Good point - he was my father's great-grandfather (according to the family tree) so I suppose I can add one to that.
I suppose I was trying to differentiate between my father's family who seem to be itinerant malcontents and my mother's family who seem to be descended from Gloucestershire landed aristocracy.
Mrs Stodge, when she found out, simply said "that explains a lot".
Polanski has made a move that will significantly alienate potential voters in the same way that Corbyn was invariably on the wrong side of the voters on wars. You don't have to be signed up to Reform to have real concerns about "asylum seeker" rape gangs on the prowl on Sussex beaches.
I don't think people leaning Green right now are ready to listen to anything negative about Saint Polanksi. But stuff like that will come through in time.
I'm not sure people leaning Green are ready to hear anything negative about illegal immigrants. There is blank denial from large numbers of people that any problem exists.
Most rapists aren't asylum seekers and most asylum seekers aren't rapists and rape denial is so strong in Britain that the CPS refuse to take lots of cases of rape to court, on the assumption juries will not convict, so I think that when I see politicians/rabble-rousers embark on a big campaign regarding specifically asylum seekers committing rape then I do wonder whether their problem is more with the rape or more with the asylum seekers.
You yourself do not view the additional rapists in our population as any big deal, then?
Any large group of men is very likely to contain a significant proportion of rapists. Perhaps it would be safer to ban the immigration of any men at all, but I think that would be a step too far. It's still a big deal though.
I disagree strongly with your first sentence.
Rape is far too prevalent a crime for it to be otherwise. Look at the number of people involved in cases such as Gisèle Pelicot's.
Comments
Putting a load more taxes on wealth creation and employment while increasing spending on welfare would not be good for the economy or society.
The one person who polls much better than Starmer is Burnham.
If Labour MPs really do go ahead and go for Rayner they are massively increasing their chances of losing their job in 2029.
But we know from history that many MPs will still run as fast as possible over the cliff.
I don’t like to accuse anyone on PB of anything, and AI is often a useful tool. But my AI-dar is pinging. Something about the last paragraph in particular.
Shadow Housing Secretary evicted ahead of rental rule changes https://share.google/0mKDV6Zi5LuNtBC42
Don't panic, don't panic. It wasn't antisemitism that stopped a local MP from visiting a school in his constituency. It was safety concerns. So there.
Pause to consider what sort of country is it where it isn't safe for an MP to visit a local school?
(No, this is not a serious remark, and you are right.)
My lest favourite is the that's not x that's y pattern that once you see, you can't mistake.
However, in this particular instance, you're just running into a mid-50's bloke who is guilty of over editing his own posts.
Who's internet history do you think these AI LLM models is built on?
If they were in opposition they'd be livid, and calling for the changes to be applied retrospectively to prevent evictions prior to the law change.
I do agree there's more honesty required but how much honesty will the electorate accept and does it have the same impact when some parties are trying to be honest and others aren't?
We come back to the central problem - everyone might agree the borrowing is a problem and "something" needs to be done but they don't want to be the ones who are negatively impacted by the "something" though they are happy for everyone else to have the pain.
People will accept pain more readily if everyone else is hurting and that's probably the only answer - plenty of pain and spread it around so tax rises, spending cuts, abolition of the triple lock, etc, etc. The more anyone sees everyone else is hurting as much as they are, the more willing they are to understand the pain.
The other side of this, however, is there has to be some positive from the pain and that has to be a perception the pain we endure now will benefit future generations -people will suffer a lot for the future, they won't forthe present.
It's obviously right that people have an absolute right not to rent out a room in their private house to an individual that they're not comfortable sharing a private space with, for whatever reason, and not have to justify that decision to anyone else. It cannot be right that people are deciding against other people on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
I thought Britain was a better country and had left behind some elements of unthinking prejudice in the past. This development would tend to suggest otherwise.
I think it's right to call out these adverts as wrong, but I'm not suggesting that anyone can foist non-Muslim lodgers on Muslim live-in landlords.
And then the press will start getting vicious...
When they announced they were moving from linear comments to nested comments with about 4 hours notice.
Increasing the total tax take means taking money out of people's pockets.
If you take money out of people's pockets, they have less to spend. They will therefore spend less. And that, in turn, means that the coffee shop in the village lets go of one of their employees. Who now isn't paying income tax, and is now claiming benefits
Which means that the deficit hasn't shrunk as much as you thought.
It's the multiplier in action.
The best way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving.
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle, deploying Vanilla in response to the absolute fury of the board,
If we whacked up basic rate income tax or employee NI we could easily send the economy straight into recession. But wealth or property taxes, top rate income tax, or NI on unearned income including pensions... less direct impact, we sould simply be slowing dwn the rate at which those of us who are better off are accumulating wealth.
In return I would ask you to consider the impact of cutting welfare benefits - a favourite of the right-wing. Pretty much every penny spent on UC goes straight back into the economy - cut UC and the economy suffers.
It then doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong on the substantive issue, because he will become known as the politician only interested in arguing the precise definition of antisemitism or relative rape risk from asylum seekers.
Cheap shot, sure, but it is titanically stupid and he's already tried to pretend he never believed it but the BBC proved that to be a lie.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9enygvezeo
It was all long ago and now is more important, but he needs a better defence than getting pissy that people bring it up, he needs to laugh at himself a little when apologising.
What's the alternative? Reduce benefits or spending? Well that definitely hits GDP. Borrow more? So end up paying more than the current 3.6% GDP in interest? Doesn't sound great.
I think perhaps new prejudices have replaced some older ones but some of the older ones clearly still exist.
The counter argument (which is not without merit) is those who seem unwilling to integrate into what might be called "British society" bring this upon themselves and those who come here to live need to adapt some of our mores and culture. I can accept that's difficult but I'm hopeful - the children seem willing to associate and integrate and in time they will help to evolve society and what it means to be British.
But allowing the enterprising and productive to keep more of their own money is not only morally right, it also benefits the economy hugely in the long run, as distortions to incentives are removed, savings and investment increase, wealth creation is rewarded and scroungers are encouraged to train and work for their money instead of being given it for doing nothing, or otherwise being unproductive.
That's why the vast majority of studies of the question show that reducing tax and spend increases long run economic growth significantly.
On the low level of convictions vs reports for rape I think it’s down in large part to most rapes occurring in grey areas. He said she said. Only two people in the room and women do sometimes lie, as do men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
NeXTSTEP Release 3: A Demonstration with Steve Jobs
And even if what you say is true, I’m not sure many people who live in Nordic countries would swap their living conditions for American-style growth. And that’s before you deploy the veil of ignorance.
I also don’t think it’s “morally right” for a small majority to enjoy all the returns from a working population - and that’s deeply dangerous territory for the rich anyway. There needs to be an incentive for everyone to engage in the economy; if 50% of your net salary goes on rent, and you need UC to make ends meet, frankly you’re entirely justified to burn the whole thing down.
Go back to my example. If people are feeling richer, then that coffee shop hires a new barista - that's one person off the welfare rolls, and now they're paying income tax. The government's deficit has just shrunk.
If you want to shrink the deficit, then how about we start freeing up the building and planning system? That will simultaneously cause an increase in employment, and will also make housing more affordable (which means that people can afford to spend more money at that coffee shop again.)
The ad contained remarks from Reform UK figures including a former council leader who called London a "third world s---hole" run by a "narcissistic Pakistani"
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2047056720019485170
The violence against women and girls is endemic. It comes from men. We are not dealing with the problems we already have from men in this country and there is no reason at all why women and girls should be subjected to even more of it. Any migrant who sexually assaults a woman should, IMO, be automatically deported at the end of their sentence and not be eligible for any sort of asylum here. I don't give a flying fuck if he'll have a difficult time in wherever he comes from. Tough.
Fantastic idea though, to encourage them to 'train and work for their money' Only somebody who is totally clueless about the benefit system could imagine this does not happen already.
Didn't create an account until the run up to the 2015 general electron, when I learned the folly of arguing with Rod Crossby.
After that I mislaid my account a few times (this is my third or fourth I think), but I have lurked here almost every day, posting almost not at all, for very nearly 20 years. What a nerd....
On that note an idea: ban letting agents.
It’s a complete pain in the arse to find new, good tenant, so I’m pretty desperate to retain mine. If they sent an email this evening demanding a £100 cut to rent I’d probably concede because I’d rather sit here with my 7% IPA than start fishing for a new one - and a very low chance I find someone with such low drama.
But the incentives are entirely perverted for agents. They make their cash from constant repairs, constant advertising. For me these are things to avoid like the plague.
So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to accommodate themselves to their new country to an extent.
But, well, I think I actually would vote for Irish Union with Britain, and if there was a party for Irish Unionists in the Republic - and they weren't bigots - then I'd consider giving them my vote, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Does that mean Ireland should put a hard limit on the number of immigrants from Britain to stop British immigrants from voting for Union with Britain? That sort of curb on front is anathema to me.
The details of the 1926 Irish census were recently published by the National Archives and are now web searchable. They seem to have done a really good job of digitising it all. From the previous censuses of 1901 and 1911, I can see the number of people with my English birth surname increasing. Then, in 1926, after the war of independence, the formation of the new state, and the civil war, I can see that the number of people with my surname decreases by 83%.
When issues of identity come to the fore then politics can quickly turn ugly and people's lives get changed for the worse. Maybe I'd be best not voting for British Unionism and leaving the status quo as it is.
Perhaps we all need to sign consent forms before sex.
They are valuable enough for people and organisations to pay for the service.
There is no fundamental reason why you should employ one if that's how you feel about them.
Is it literally they mapped the world and stuck 3 random words for each square. Surely there has to be more to it?
https://act.labour.org.uk/p/reform-revealed?utm_campaign=ENGAGEMENT+-+PEB+TRAIL+-+23042026&utm_medium=email&utm_source=movement
He assumed the vetting was a pointless formality anyway given Mandelson already appointed and was previously a minister and overruled the UKSV assuming no one would ever know.
Then when it all went wrong he tried to argue the report was too confidential for anyone to see.
I've always thought the only way there would ever be a United Ireland is if and when the south gave the north an offer it couldn't refuse - if it got to the point when the south was clearly wealthier than the north, the north might be tempted. It hasn't happened yet but it might one day.
I've also thought there was more chance of London seeking to break from the rest of the UK but that'll get one or two on here over-excited at the notion of a Singapore-on-Thames type mini-state.
They're are slightly more than 27 billion what three words squares in the UK.
So there's an average of about 15,000 what three words squares per post code.
Their R&D budget can’t be very high. And server costs don’t explain their other costs. Nor does headcount.
Something doesn’t add up.
We have all grown up in a (relatively) tolerant, respectful, rich country. We shouldn’t forget that most of the rest of the world isn’t so lucky, particularly for those young men making the journey across the channel. Even if it’s a small minority, that’s going to be a larger proportion than those here already.
I think a full ban and permanent disqualification for illegal entry is necessary, even for children. But a carrot too - if you’re the young parents of children escaping a war, you’ve got a great chance of approval if you present at a refugee camp or UK embassy.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/landmark-planning-and-infrastructure-bill-becomes-law
It's not clear at all why we allow any men to emigrate to the UK.
It does seem as though they weren't very careful about their choice of words, which means small typos, or mistakes of communication, are not well-handled.
I suppose I was trying to differentiate between my father's family who seem to be itinerant malcontents and my mother's family who seem to be descended from Gloucestershire landed aristocracy.
Mrs Stodge, when she found out, simply said "that explains a lot".
https://biobank.rocher.lc/
TL;DR the leak was inevitable, and the alibaba claims are just news-fluff.