Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
I may be being completely naïve here but surely Streeting would not have acted the way he has if he was not very confident he had the numbers for a challenge. Even by Labour party standards that would be totally brainless.
He’s in a lose lose situation now I think.
He probably does just need to go for it. Even if he loses the political wilderness doesn’t tend to last forever and if he loses he possibly becomes the “look what you could have had” candidate for the future.
But I don’t think he’s got a route to the top job in any contest held now.
Given that the collective Labour Party tends to be lacking in vertebrae, I think there’s a bigger chance he meekly backs down in return for keeping his job (though if I were SKS I’d probably end up sacking him in due course).
I'm guessing he misjudged Starmer and thought that he would be standing down rather than fighting and wanted to make sure he got his hat in the ring. But if you don't have the support of 81 out of 400 your thinking that you are in with a chance is seriously delusional. I thought he was supposed to be the sane one?
Yes, Streeting's achillies heel is that he is Billy Nomates in the PLP.
I may be being completely naïve here but surely Streeting would not have acted the way he has if he was not very confident he had the numbers for a challenge. Even by Labour party standards that would be totally brainless.
He’s in a lose lose situation now I think.
He probably does just need to go for it. Even if he loses the political wilderness doesn’t tend to last forever and if he loses he possibly becomes the “look what you could have had” candidate for the future.
But I don’t think he’s got a route to the top job in any contest held now.
Given that the collective Labour Party tends to be lacking in vertebrae, I think there’s a bigger chance he meekly backs down in return for keeping his job (though if I were SKS I’d probably end up sacking him in due course).
I'm guessing he misjudged Starmer and thought that he would be standing down rather than fighting and wanted to make sure he got his hat in the ring. But if you don't have the support of 81 out of 400 your thinking that you are in with a chance is seriously delusional. I thought he was supposed to be the sane one?
Starmer has some backbone, for better and worse. You shouldn't make plans on the assumption your oppponent will make things easy for you.
Goes for politics generally, when the opponent is the economy.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
Construction lawyer loves regulation. Well I’m stunned.
Asking for reform to make it easier to build, something the govt committed to do, is not unreasonable to expect them to do something. It is odd to expect a layman to have the fine detail.
Still we can carry on as we are and keep getting what we’re getting.
Reform of this may help, Sunak tried and was blocked for political reasons.
I don’t love regulations at all so that is a misrepresentation. I just asked exactly what he wants to change, which is a fair question. Simply saying “I want reform!” Is meaningless.
Nutrient neutrality is a planning regulation not a building regulation and I have never been a fan of that.
I never claimed it was a building regulation. I said reforming it would help.
Very impressive from the King of the North. Given those ratings, its absurd to think he wouldn't win most Manchester by-elections despite the council elections - indeed a big part of Labour doing badly in Manchester was the lack of consideration given to their King by the party leadership in Westeros.
On the face of it, it’s impressive for Starmer too. Basically any Labour leader beats Farage easily in a 1:1.
I guess this is where the rationale comes from for a left-wing leader, because you need those left wind voters to actually get up and vote for Labour to beat Reform. A Cooper or a Streeting or a Starmer is not going to do that.
Starmer was a left wing leader until he had to balance the budgets......expect the same for whoever comes in next
At least one killed (it will be more than that) and dozens injured after nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv partially collapsed following a Russian drone strike.
Not a military target, just Ukranians sleeping in their beds.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
Maybe. Maybe not. You can’t possibly say and neither can he.
Just finished my foraging expedition in the lovely unexpected sunshine
Gemma, our forager, gave us the remarkable information that just five little needles of a yew tree, if ingested, will very likely kill you. And it’s not a nice death. It’s notably painful, almost entirely irreversible once you eat them, the pain increases over hours and then you drop dead of a heart attack
Gemma also mentioned that when we all had a formal dinner last night she noted the owners of this impressive baronial hall - where we dined - had decorated the tables with green spring foliage. Including small branches of yew tree
Seeing this she half panicked and went around making sure none of the yew sprigs were poised over anyone’s plate, potentially dropping leaves (she found a couple of questionable placements)
It occurs to me this could be an excellent plot device in a thriller, if we have any thriller writers in the forum
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
The middle class struggle in jobs they were told should be comfortable. It stings more.
Me, i'm doing fine, but near everyone i know stresses.
This soap opera has so many twists. Rayner for mayor?
Sadiq for Prime Minister?
The only person less interesting than Starmer!
Leave it to Labour…
From his office overlooking the Thames on the eastern fringes of the capital, Khan says the biggest lesson he has learned in his time as mayor is to be a “coalition builder”.
“I’m somebody who’s quite pugnacious. I used to be a litigation lawyer, so I’m quite adversarial,” he says. “But my experience as mayor has taught me that actually working together achieves far more.” ... Khan says he works closely with other mayors. “I’m a firm believer in stealing well rather than inventing badly. And so if another city’s doing a great job, I’ll nick it.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/11/sadiq-khan-10-years-london-mayor-labour-environment
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
I think we need to drop the “billionaires” thing. My own relatives, who aren’t stunningly rich, have made loads of cash from inheritance and house price inflation.
Even I have tbh - owning a flat in Edinburgh has been highly lucrative, and I’m also making significant gains from my ISA, protected by the ludicrously high annual allowance.
Bin NICs, CGT on property, drop ISA allowance to £5k.
Having an overall cap on ISAs - for example £100k in cash ISAs and another £100k in an investment ISA - would certainly be worth considering, capping the overall benefit in a similar way as was done for pensions. When ISAs (originally PEPs) were introduced, the intention was to provide an incentive for ordinary people to save relatively modest amounts, free of tax. No-one envisaged that decades later there would be middle-aged people using their accumulated allowance to shelter the income and capital gains from a £million or more of savings and investments from tax.
The limits should be set on deposits not value, but otherwise I agree.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
And the lack of coal fires, and the better quality of electrical products... To attribute this fall to building regulations seems odd. I can see how they might well mean that fires that do break out are less serious, spread less, are less likely to cause bodily harm etc, but stopping them in the first place? Not seeing that.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
Mostly a decline in smoking, and advances in electrical device standards. No more ‘70s electric blankets.
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
I told you all over and over and over again before
DARREN JONES
Streeting has to stick or twist today - he is, as a few Labour commentators have pointed out - The next Clive Lewis
Rayner, if as reported , has got her HMRC pass...will be the left candidate (negating Miliband)
Mahmood - too right wing
Cooper - too wedded to the past
Burnham - as you'll all know, I simply don't rate him, see him as a chancer and if he can't get a seat and a by-election announced by next Tuesday could be dead in the water.
The dark horse is DARREN JONES
Very much a Cameron moment!
Young Photogenic Excellent Communicator Fiscally smart enough not to upset the Markets but to understand the left requirements Young enough but experienced enough to make all other Party leaders look "past it" Would have Ms Aggression for toast.
If he's not next Leader and PM, he's nailed on the be next Chancellor imho
Agree that Jones has potential. Especially if that moment should come when the party is looking for a suit of customary and traditional ability. I think many thought that Starmer would be that grey suit but he has lacked that capacity to get you not to fall asleep which Carney has.
The party at the moment is looking for a miracle worker WRT both voters and making all the problems go away. Obviously there isn't going to be one.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
We live in a 'victim culture'.
Those who are 'victims' get more entitlements, those who aren't get more responsibilities.
And if you're not complaining you're not a 'victim'.
You mean that a third of students at Harvard aren’t actually disabled, but instead happy to get single-room accomodation and extra time in exams?
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
Mostly a decline in smoking, and advances in electrical device standards. No more ‘70s electric blankets.
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
My wife was telling me her cousins middle son had a house fire due to a charger on his golf cart going on fire when being charged.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
Mostly a decline in smoking, and advances in electrical device standards. No more ‘70s electric blankets.
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
My wife was telling me her cousins middle son had a house fire due to a charger on his golf cart going on fire when being charged.
More to come I suspect.
So those fires are caused by Chinese lithium-ion batteries that don’t properly comply with our regulations? Hmm…
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
We also need a national effort to refurbish and renew all of the derelict housing. So many communities and large parts of some towns are semi-derelict with decaying housing stock owned by God knows who and left to decay. CPO the lot, have the LA refit them and regentrify the area.
Agreed. There was some of that done in Manchester/Salford when I worked there about 20 years ago. Whole streets of terraces refurbed and extended.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
Try this as a simple example
Loft conversion on a terraced house.
You take out the roof, put in a steel frame to hold up the new roof shape *and protect the neighbouring houses*
I put in a fuckton of steel in. Hundreds of percent of structural margin.
Building control didn’t come round until the steel was covered.
So they looked at the plans and nodded. Could have been drop forged Wensleydale in there for all they knew.
The mountain of paperwork doesn’t matter a dog scratch. What counts is what is built.
I’ve seen blocks of flats where the paperwork, if you printed it, would weigh metric tons. But physical concrete sample tests weren’t done. So they had all the bullshit, but reality was utterly different.
Right. I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said but I don’t understand your point. That’s an example of the regulations not being applied properly. It’s unclear how making them “easier” would fix that issue.
Yes, what is described is a lack of enforcement. The same goes for Trading standards vs dubious shops, fly-tipping, shoplifting, anti-semitic and racist chanting etc etc.
In part this is from making new regulations and similtaneously cutting local authority and police budgets to the bone so they cannot enforce the rules. So cowboys and crooks get away with it.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
Maybe. Maybe not. You can’t possibly say and neither can he.
Yes you can. You can look at whether the decline in fires has been shallower in households with smokers or not, and you can look at whether how often cigarettes are named as the case in fire accident reports, or whether houses built under the new regulations are significantly less likely to burn than those under the old ones.
Also you can look for other factors such as more smoke alarms fewer old style chip pans being used.
Building regulations may or may not have played a role, but if so it seems to have a pretty small one.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
We all make our choices.
And they can be right or wrong depending on the individual.
I work in a lower paid, less stressful job than I could do. Live in a smaller house in a less posh area than I could do. Drive a smaller, less prestigious car than I could do.
In exchange for having financial assets, more free time and peace of mind.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
And the lack of coal fires, and the better quality of electrical products... To attribute this fall to building regulations seems odd. I can see how they might well mean that fires that do break out are less serious, spread less, are less likely to cause bodily harm etc, but stopping them in the first place? Not seeing that.
It’s a combination - fireproofing sofas and beds, much less smoking at home, modern fuse boxes (breakers that trip at the hint of a problem)…
There’s been an uptick in fires from ultra cheap, low quality products though. Guess what - enforcement is very poor. So garbage with all the certification marks is on sale.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
And the lack of coal fires, and the better quality of electrical products... To attribute this fall to building regulations seems odd. I can see how they might well mean that fires that do break out are less serious, spread less, are less likely to cause bodily harm etc, but stopping them in the first place? Not seeing that.
Simple insistence on non-combustible materials (eg plasterboard) for interior walls is a big one. Requirement for smoke detectors is another one. Electrical wiring regs too. Gas installation regs. Fire escape regs have saved lives if not prevented fires.
The whole of Building Regs Approved Document B is dedicated to this and for the most part is a big plus.
Building Regs changes have also driven more energy efficient homes.
OTOH allowing private Building Inspection services to satisfy free-marketeer ideology has unsurprisingly led to compromise in the implementation of Building Regs imo - private inspection companies shy away from upsetting their paying customers.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
... or maybe of the long term decline in smoking and a wider awareness of personal safety?
Maybe. Maybe not. You can’t possibly say and neither can he.
Yes you can. You can look at whether the decline in fires has been shallower in households with smokers or not, and you can look at whether how often cigarettes are named as the case in fire accident reports, or whether houses built under the new regulations are significantly less likely to burn than those under the old ones.
Also you can look for other factors such as more smoke alarms fewer old style chip pans being used.
Building regulations may or may not have played a role, but if so it seems to have a pretty small one.
So where is this data? I’m not saying you’re wrong but just because you say it doesn’t mean it’s true.
By the way, more smoke alarms, and smoke alarms wired into the mains rather than on batteries, ARE part of the Building Regulations
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
A parable of the national finances?
My dad says he has never bought a house that he could afford. Historically that has been a great investment, but I am not so sure that it is a wise policy now.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
So is the Rusholme option off the table since I went to bed? I don't think he'd be favourite to win there but I'd still give him at least a 30% chance. In which case, it's his. Assuming the contest isn't done and dusted by then.
Andy Burnham has a regular phone-in radio slot on BBC Radio Manchester and he was due to appear on presenter Mike Sweeney's programme on Thursday morning.
But we learned last night that Burnham has pulled out, as speculation mounts over a potential challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's leadership.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
While Rayner would win back a few from the Greens and a few from Reform in the red wall she would totally turn off middle class swing voters. So the biggest winners from a Rayner Labour leadership would be Badenoch and Davey and the Tories and LDs. Though Rayner also needs 81 Labour MPs to nominate her to stand which is not certain
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
In my case I don't have that. I don't spend money on myself. Never any left. Really need footwear, making these last, resurrected old shoes with superglue etc. Whatever jollies I have are business (always film trips for content so that all trips are business).
As for actual business, it's no wonder small businesses are going pop at alarming rates. Taxes which have punitive rises (business rates, ENIC), petty, stupid and expensive admin (director IDs where you need to *separately* register your ID as director and then PSC and it practically screams fraud at you because Companies House registered you 3 times).
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
I agree.
On Raynor's competence, she's going to need trusted allies to make sure things get done. And she should make sure these are MP cabinet member allies, like Cameron had with Osbourne, not faceless Spads like Starmer adopted.
If she can do that then perhaps she can do the charismatic leader part while ensuring things get done behind the scenes. And probably win a good chunk of Green voters back from the much less likable Polanski.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
Mostly a decline in smoking, and advances in electrical device standards. No more ‘70s electric blankets.
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
My wife was telling me her cousins middle son had a house fire due to a charger on his golf cart going on fire when being charged.
More to come I suspect.
So those fires are caused by Chinese lithium-ion batteries that don’t properly comply with our regulations? Hmm…
Problem is it's very easy to buy a Cheap Chinese battery - and people don't realise how much of Aliexpress is knock offs..
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
They need a contest now to get this all out of their collective systems. The only other alternative to that is a huge Starmer power-play/refresh which brings the soft left more closely into government and probably involves chucking Reeves under the bus, in return for Starmer having a bit longer in office to try to turn things around. Of course, given Starmer is incapable of communicating well that is a temporary solution at best, and probably just stalling a Burnham takeover.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
Some people live below their income, some people live to their income, some people live above their income.
This happens irrespective of what their income is.
Boris is an example of someone who has always lived above his income and pleaded poverty.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
So is the Rusholme option off the table since I went to bed? I don't think he'd be favourite to win there but I'd still give him at least a 30% chance. In which case, it's his. Assuming the contest isn't done and dusted by then.
Doesn’t Burnham have to resign as mayor to contest a constituency? If he’s only got a 30% chance this feels like an insane risk. He could burn down his career in one go
He could lose the by election (I suspect that’s highly likely as voters hate Labour so much) then see the manc mayoralty get won by reform. He’d go down as a total loser, disdained by many - whereas right now he is apparently popular
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
Agree with this summary.
Re the HMRC clearance: I am not surprised. No doubt this has been fast-tracked because HMRC will not want to be seen unnecessarily preventing a possible PM candidate from entering the race. It's a tricky one for them but one has got to ask how it can take more than a day or two for an investigator to review the evidence and make a recommendation.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
So is the Rusholme option off the table since I went to bed? I don't think he'd be favourite to win there but I'd still give him at least a 30% chance. In which case, it's his. Assuming the contest isn't done and dusted by then.
Doesn’t Burnham have to resign as mayor to contest a constituency? If he’s only got a 30% chance this feels like an insane risk. He could burn down his career in one go
He could lose the by election (I suspect that’s highly likely as voters hate Labour so much) then see the manc mayoralty get won by reform. He’d go down as a total loser, disdained by many - whereas right now he is apparently popular
Unlikely given Burnham polls far better than Starmer and better than Farage and Polanski too
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
I think its the chaos monkey argument that Starmer is inevitably relying on. If Streeting goes first then he gets the blame for that when the bond markets go crazy and peoples mortgages go up. Anecdotally, my daughter was trying to remortgage and the offer she had was withdrawn at the last minute this week. I wonder if lenders are seeing higher gilt rates around the corner and tightening their lending criteria.
Once Streeting is in the ring Rayner can come in to "protect" the party from this right wing nutter. I think its more difficult for her if Streeting doesn't have the numbers. Does she stand anyway?
I absolutely fail to see the appeal of Rayner. Economically deluded, way too far left, happier to hit the rich to please her base rather than do something that makes sense.
Maybe she's what a middle class Southerner thinks a Northerner should be. To me, she comes across as full of shit.
My mother's someone who's voted for many parties, but I was quite surprised by how much she disliked Rayner as well. Not the biggest sample size, and maybe she'd* do well getting the far left to return from the Greens, but that may come at the expense of centrists and people who know how numbers work.
Labour backbenchers who think their job is to fling money at people and spend ever more could be happy too.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
They need a contest now to get this all out of their collective systems. The only other alternative to that is a huge Starmer power-play/refresh which brings the soft left more closely into government and probably involves chucking Reeves under the bus, in return for Starmer having a bit longer in office to try to turn things around. Of course, given Starmer is incapable of communicating well that is a temporary solution at best, and probably just stalling a Burnham takeover.
Yes the worst outcome for Labour is no contest. Even one where Starmer wins in a "back me or sack me John Major style " one is better. It is the only way to kill off the speculation.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
Some people live below their income, some people live to their income, some people live above their income.
This happens irrespective of what their income is.
Boris is an example of someone who has always lived above his income and pleaded poverty.
I think we have tended to do a generally poor job at reminding people that they can live below their income, in this country. Clearly I say that where actual disposable income exists.
To what question is Angela Rayner the answer, seriously?
She was the housing minister for two years, oversaw a steep drop in housing starts, no legislation to make planning or building regs easier, and then had to resign over screwing up her own housing arrangements to the tune of £40k in tax.
£40k which she’s now managed to find under the mattress despite a huge drop in salary.
Hoping for some common sense from the MPs, when deciding who to nominate.
Ed Miliband goes in the same bucket, everything he’s done as a minister has held the country back.
Which parts of the Building Regulations do you want to make “easier”?
About the last three decades of them.
Also make modular homes and US-style wooden houses mortgageable.
So basically you don’t know and that was just a vacuous statement of hope and dreams as per our politicians.
And on mortgages, you want to put more regulations in place to force banks to mortgage wooden and modular homes? There is a huge contradiction there.
No, I’m saying that almost nothing good has come out of building regulations since 1997. As @Malmesbury said, there’s piles of paperwork, and hundreds of compliance standards for efficiency and environmental impacts, most of which are mostly observed in the breach and penalise good builders in favour of bad builders.
On ‘temporary’ homes, what’s required is some sort of industry insurance scheme that certifies them for 50 years, underwritten by government.
A standard three-bed, 1,000sqft house should cost £100k to build, plus the land and infrastructure works. The government should be finding every parcel of land they can and facilitating the building a couple of million of them per year. Planning regulations should be torn up to facilitate this.
That’s how you solve a housing shortage, just as happened after WWII.
Pretty much everything else in the economy gets better quickly if housing becomes affordable again.
Fires in domestic residences are still going down, I believe. That's evidence of building regs doing something good.
Mostly a decline in smoking, and advances in electrical device standards. No more ‘70s electric blankets.
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
My wife was telling me her cousins middle son had a house fire due to a charger on his golf cart going on fire when being charged.
More to come I suspect.
So those fires are caused by Chinese lithium-ion batteries that don’t properly comply with our regulations? Hmm…
Problem is it's very easy to buy a Cheap Chinese battery - and people don't realise how much of Aliexpress is knock offs..
And once one kid in the school buys a £50 motor kit that turns a pushbike into a (very illegal) 40mph motorbike, they all want one.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
They need a contest now to get this all out of their collective systems. The only other alternative to that is a huge Starmer power-play/refresh which brings the soft left more closely into government and probably involves chucking Reeves under the bus, in return for Starmer having a bit longer in office to try to turn things around. Of course, given Starmer is incapable of communicating well that is a temporary solution at best, and probably just stalling a Burnham takeover.
A solution for Starmer that involves sacking someone else for his inadequacies and poor judgment? That's got legs.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
So is the Rusholme option off the table since I went to bed? I don't think he'd be favourite to win there but I'd still give him at least a 30% chance. In which case, it's his. Assuming the contest isn't done and dusted by then.
Doesn’t Burnham have to resign as mayor to contest a constituency? If he’s only got a 30% chance this feels like an insane risk. He could burn down his career in one go
He could lose the by election (I suspect that’s highly likely as voters hate Labour so much) then see the manc mayoralty get won by reform. He’d go down as a total loser, disdained by many - whereas right now he is apparently popular
No, he only has to resign as mayor if elected as an MP.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
Everyone else ???
I'm not and I bet you're not and I doubt many PBers are.
Likewise many/most of us will be financial asset owners as well.
The divide between those doing well and those struggling is a lot lower than the billionaire level.
I live in one of the nicer houses in the village. Looks impressive although has got money pit tendencies. We own a shop. I'm a management consultant and alarmingly well know YouTuber driving a nice car (I had 3 separate people come chat with me about it on Friday at the count).
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
My richest friend is also the one who most struggles to pay the bills. He earns far more than anyonr I know, but is always telling me about his impending bankruptcy, having to move money from onr account to another, how the stress of it all us making him ill. Yet he is a member of everything, eats out weekly at restaurants I wouldn't eat at once a year, goes abroad at least three times a year. He's off to tge World Cup next month. Everything he has is the most expeneive possible version of that thing. I can't help feeling that if he dialled back the consumption to my levels he could have retired years ago. Objectively he is far better off than his parents, but he will go to an early grave.
Some people live below their income, some people live to their income, some people live above their income.
This happens irrespective of what their income is.
Boris is an example of someone who has always lived above his income and pleaded poverty.
I think we have tended to do a generally poor job at reminding people that they can live below their income, in this country. Clearly I say that where actual disposable income exists.
It's easy to live below your income if you're in the top 25% of income and/or have substantial assets, inherited or otherwise.
Unable to work and on UC... not so easy. Edit: Or indeed working in low-paid employment but still qualifying for UC support...
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
From the point of view of those seeking to change the direction of the Labour government over the remaining life of this parliament, rather than replace factional Starmer with continuity factional Streeting, the main risk of Rayner until now was that we would see a Starmer v Streeting v Rayner leadership contest lasting a month or two, in the middle of which HMRC would pronounce and compromise Rayner enough that she could not win. That is why Miliband seemed a safer choice to take on Streeting. But that risk with Rayner is now gone.
Burnham should for now settle for backing one of Rayner or Miliband as PM in return for them offering the opportunity for a rapid path back to parliament and in the meantime a temporary ennoblement (which he could renouce in due course to stand in a by-election) to enable him to serve in the Cabinet in the meantime. That does not rule out him becoming PM later in the parliament should Labour fail to rebuild and consolidate support on the left.
I absolutely fail to see the appeal of Rayner. Economically deluded, way too far left, happier to hit the rich to please her base rather than do something that makes sense.
Maybe she's what a middle class Southerner thinks a Northerner should be. To me, she comes across as full of shit.
My mother's someone who's voted for many parties, but I was quite surprised by how much she disliked Rayner as well. Not the biggest sample size, and maybe she'd* do well getting the far left to return from the Greens, but that may come at the expense of centrists and people who know how numbers work.
Labour backbenchers who think their job is to fling money at people and spend ever more could be happy too.
Edited: *Rayner, not my mother. Ahem.
People in my family really loathe Rayner as well. But my family is quite right wing (but not totally so)
I dunno. She’s way too left for me but I can see her appeal. Straight talking and with some guts. Fought her way up from a very tough background
And of course a woman. Finally a woman leader - and not from london and not middle class. It would be harder for Badenoch to beat her up in the commons (as she is beginning to do to Starmer as she improves). Attacks from Farage might come across as misogyny and/or snobbery
Given the paucity of the choices, if I was a Labour MP I’d likely roll the dice. Get rid of Starmer and install Rayner and then pray to god. It’s not like Labour can afford to do nothing. They are plunging in the polls, sometimes down to 15%
A parliamentary source told The Times: “Al Carns has said ‘he is getting on with doing his job’, but if someone fires the starting gun, he isn’t afraid of gunfire”. They said the implication was Carns “would throw his hat in the ring should someone trigger a race”.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
But does she stay or does she go?
If you say that you are mine I'll be here 'til the end of time So, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Why? Why does she need to wait for Streeting? Apparently there’s no love lost twixt her and Skyr
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
I think its the chaos monkey argument that Starmer is inevitably relying on. If Streeting goes first then he gets the blame for that when the bond markets go crazy and peoples mortgages go up. Anecdotally, my daughter was trying to remortgage and the offer she had was withdrawn at the last minute this week. I wonder if lenders are seeing higher gilt rates around the corner and tightening their lending criteria.
Once Streeting is in the ring Rayner can come in to "protect" the party from this right wing nutter. I think its more difficult for her if Streeting doesn't have the numbers. Does she stand anyway?
30y gilts are 5.8%, 10y gilts are 5.1%, well above the base rate of 3.75%.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
So is the Rusholme option off the table since I went to bed? I don't think he'd be favourite to win there but I'd still give him at least a 30% chance. In which case, it's his. Assuming the contest isn't done and dusted by then.
Doesn’t Burnham have to resign as mayor to contest a constituency? If he’s only got a 30% chance this feels like an insane risk. He could burn down his career in one go
He could lose the by election (I suspect that’s highly likely as voters hate Labour so much) then see the manc mayoralty get won by reform. He’d go down as a total loser, disdained by many - whereas right now he is apparently popular
No, he only has to resign as mayor if elected as an MP.
Ah thanks. That does slightly alter the equation. Maybe he will take the risk - find a constituency and fight for it
But can he do it fast enough? It all feels a bit unreal and unlikely
For all those of us who DON'T have a NS subscription, an AI summary of the text in that article is:
"...The recent election results reflect a long-standing sentiment among working people that the system is failing them. Issues such as deindustrialization, austerity, Brexit, and COVID-19 contributed to widespread feelings of insecurity. People believe that working hard should guarantee a stable life, but economic and community instability prevents that. Carns argues that the interconnectedness of defence, economy, healthcare, and education underscores the fragility of the nation. Simplistic solutions from figures like Nigel Farage are appealing because they exploit those disillusioned by politics. But these proposals lack serious plans for the country's recovery and can lead to further division without addressing the root causes of insecurity faced by families..."
In short, it's an article that is too long on sentiment and far too short on policies that will fix this. I don't care that he was in the Marines and can kick the crap out of me, he should have his arse slapped for such a lazy article. I KNOW PEOPLE ARE INSECURE AND THAT FARAGE IS OFFERING SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS. NOW TELL ME HOW TO FIX IT.
@TheScreamingEagles@TSE@rcs1000 , what's the site position on AI summaries of paywalled articles? I know cut-and-paste isn't allowed, but are AI summaries?
Not allowed
1) Bypasses paywalls
2) AI produces crap
3) Too much AI content and Vanilla thinks you're a spammer abd takes appropriate action.
I looked into this recently
Using a paywall bypass breaks the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1998 - which prohibits the use of “technological devices” to breach copyright. If you do it at home alone you’re still breaking the law but no one will ever catch you
Doing it then posting it on here would be quite public law breaking. So, a very sensible rule
The nastiest legal letter PB has ever received was in 2011 from The Times when Plato was copying and pasting entire articles from behind their paywall.
I view these paywall bypass websites as a bit like those chipped boxes/firesticks that allow you to watch all the sports for free.
Eventually the authorities and copyright holders will go for them and the people who use them.
Essentially it is stealing revenue which must be annoying when finally media organisations have finally worked out how to make a profit from their websites and apps.
A parliamentary source told The Times: “Al Carns has said ‘he is getting on with doing his job’, but if someone fires the starting gun, he isn’t afraid of gunfire”. They said the implication was Carns “would throw his hat in the ring should someone trigger a race”.
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
We live in a 'victim culture'.
Those who are 'victims' get more entitlements, those who aren't get more responsibilities.
And if you're not complaining you're not a 'victim'.
And the biggest "victim" claims come from Reform UK voters.
Excellent GDP figures out. Were it not for Mandelson, suspect Starmer would be able to talk about turning the economy around and see off leadership disquiet.
For all those of us who DON'T have a NS subscription, an AI summary of the text in that article is:
"...The recent election results reflect a long-standing sentiment among working people that the system is failing them. Issues such as deindustrialization, austerity, Brexit, and COVID-19 contributed to widespread feelings of insecurity. People believe that working hard should guarantee a stable life, but economic and community instability prevents that. Carns argues that the interconnectedness of defence, economy, healthcare, and education underscores the fragility of the nation. Simplistic solutions from figures like Nigel Farage are appealing because they exploit those disillusioned by politics. But these proposals lack serious plans for the country's recovery and can lead to further division without addressing the root causes of insecurity faced by families..."
In short, it's an article that is too long on sentiment and far too short on policies that will fix this. I don't care that he was in the Marines and can kick the crap out of me, he should have his arse slapped for such a lazy article. I KNOW PEOPLE ARE INSECURE AND THAT FARAGE IS OFFERING SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS. NOW TELL ME HOW TO FIX IT.
@TheScreamingEagles@TSE@rcs1000 , what's the site position on AI summaries of paywalled articles? I know cut-and-paste isn't allowed, but are AI summaries?
Not allowed
1) Bypasses paywalls
2) AI produces crap
3) Too much AI content and Vanilla thinks you're a spammer abd takes appropriate action.
I looked into this recently
Using a paywall bypass breaks the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1998 - which prohibits the use of “technological devices” to breach copyright. If you do it at home alone you’re still breaking the law but no one will ever catch you
Doing it then posting it on here would be quite public law breaking. So, a very sensible rule
The nastiest legal letter PB has ever received was in 2011 from The Times when Plato was copying and pasting entire articles from behind their paywall.
I view these paywall bypass websites as a bit like those chipped boxes/firesticks that all you to watch all the sports for free.
Eventually the authorities and copyright holders will go for them and the people who use them.
Essentially it is stealing revenue which must be annoying when finally media organisations have finally worked out how to make a profit from their websites and apps.
They should compile a body of evidence then sue the AI company. Much more likely to actually win some money than random blob number 473.
The funny thing about this fizzling out is that Keith will think he has done a great job staring this down. What a victory!
Whilst ignoring the catastrophic results last week and pledging No Change. Not even a reshuffle. Not even requiring renewed pledges of fealty from Streeting or Mahmood
For all those of us who DON'T have a NS subscription, an AI summary of the text in that article is:
"...The recent election results reflect a long-standing sentiment among working people that the system is failing them. Issues such as deindustrialization, austerity, Brexit, and COVID-19 contributed to widespread feelings of insecurity. People believe that working hard should guarantee a stable life, but economic and community instability prevents that. Carns argues that the interconnectedness of defence, economy, healthcare, and education underscores the fragility of the nation. Simplistic solutions from figures like Nigel Farage are appealing because they exploit those disillusioned by politics. But these proposals lack serious plans for the country's recovery and can lead to further division without addressing the root causes of insecurity faced by families..."
In short, it's an article that is too long on sentiment and far too short on policies that will fix this. I don't care that he was in the Marines and can kick the crap out of me, he should have his arse slapped for such a lazy article. I KNOW PEOPLE ARE INSECURE AND THAT FARAGE IS OFFERING SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS. NOW TELL ME HOW TO FIX IT.
@TheScreamingEagles@TSE@rcs1000 , what's the site position on AI summaries of paywalled articles? I know cut-and-paste isn't allowed, but are AI summaries?
Not allowed
1) Bypasses paywalls
2) AI produces crap
3) Too much AI content and Vanilla thinks you're a spammer abd takes appropriate action.
I looked into this recently
Using a paywall bypass breaks the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1998 - which prohibits the use of “technological devices” to breach copyright. If you do it at home alone you’re still breaking the law but no one will ever catch you
Doing it then posting it on here would be quite public law breaking. So, a very sensible rule
The nastiest legal letter PB has ever received was in 2011 from The Times when Plato was copying and pasting entire articles from behind their paywall.
I view these paywall bypass websites as a bit like those chipped boxes/firesticks that all you to watch all the sports for free.
Eventually the authorities and copyright holders will go for them and the people who use them.
Essentially it is stealing revenue which must be annoying when finally media organisations have finally worked out how to make a profit from their websites and apps.
Yes. I can say with some insider confidence that media lawyers are now really on top of this. The paywall bypass websites are all being taken down one by one - and sometimes prosecuted. Then they will come for the bypass website users
AIUI the fines can be seriously nasty
Reddit is telling all its users to quit pasting this stuff
And of course it’s an easy win for governments and police. Just enforce the law and the media will like you more
Growth has mildly outperformed expectations more often than not in recent years recently, under both governments. Not stellar, but better than you’d think from the headlines. The British mentality remains relentlessly negative. Which in turn holds back investment and consumer spending.
Yes, the gloom is way overdone. Our country has problems but a lot of strengths too.
Just a sign of the widespread, and inexplicable to me, Western dissatisfaction.
"The country is f*cked', 'worst government ever', etc. etc. And much of this from people who lived through the 70s, for example. By any set objective measures we are immeasurably better off than we were then.
A large part of the problem is increasing inequality by age and geography.
Returns on capital are far better than on working, so the benefits of growth are accruing to those with assets rather than the wider population. So we see billionaires with superyachts while everyone else is struggling to pay the bills.
I think we need to drop the “billionaires” thing. My own relatives, who aren’t stunningly rich, have made loads of cash from inheritance and house price inflation.
Even I have tbh - owning a flat in Edinburgh has been highly lucrative, and I’m also making significant gains from my ISA, protected by the ludicrously high annual allowance.
Bin NICs, CGT on property, drop ISA allowance to £5k.
Having an overall cap on ISAs - for example £100k in cash ISAs and another £100k in an investment ISA - would certainly be worth considering, capping the overall benefit in a similar way as was done for pensions. When ISAs (originally PEPs) were introduced, the intention was to provide an incentive for ordinary people to save relatively modest amounts, free of tax. No-one envisaged that decades later there would be middle-aged people using their accumulated allowance to shelter the income and capital gains from a £million or more of savings and investments from tax.
Is that true? Even if not and it is just coincidence, the £20,000 ISA limit corresponds roughly to a year's worth of mortgage payments and it may be the Treasury would rather empty nesters who'd paid off their mortgages saved in ISAs rather than spaffing it on mid-life crisis sports cars and exotic holidays.
The funny thing about this fizzling out is that Keith will think he has done a great job staring this down. What a victory!
Whilst ignoring the catastrophic results last week and pledging No Change. Not even a reshuffle. Not even requiring renewed pledges of fealty from Streeting or Mahmood
If all the challengers do bottle it, the fact doesn't change that he is too weak to sack anybody while he can't talk to half the cabinet as he is too scared what they might say to him. That can't go on.
A parliamentary source told The Times: “Al Carns has said ‘he is getting on with doing his job’, but if someone fires the starting gun, he isn’t afraid of gunfire”. They said the implication was Carns “would throw his hat in the ring should someone trigger a race”.
There's also a .com. Last autumn there was a Streeting one that turned out to be an attack site.
I have a bit of a crush on Rayner, but trying to not let that lead me to under estimate the risks of her leadership I'm still not confident in guessing how good or bad (nearly) anyone will be.
Policies might be good or bad but will change. General competence can be estimated but is often wildly wrong. Style and tone can be offputting but not always relevant to outcomes.
I just don't know. I do feel confident Streeting would lose to her and is sacked whoever becomes PM if not him.
From the point of view of those seeking to change the direction of the Labour government over the remaining life of this parliament, rather than replace factional Starmer with continuity factional Streeting, the main risk of Rayner until now was that we would see a Starmer v Streeting v Rayner leadership contest lasting a month or two, in the middle of which HMRC would pronounce and compromise Rayner enough that she could not win. That is why Miliband seemed a safer choice to take on Streeting. But that risk with Rayner is now gone.
Burnham should for now settle for backing one of Rayner or Miliband as PM in return for them offering the opportunity for a rapid path back to parliament and in the meantime a temporary ennoblement (which he could renouce in due course to stand in a by-election) to enable him to serve in the Cabinet in the meantime. That does not rule out him becoming PM later in the parliament should Labour fail to rebuild and consolidate support on the left.
Suspect thats too much like hard work for Burnham. He wants to walk into the top job.
As a football player he was reportedly a goal hanger of a striker, always looking for a tap in.
Excellent GDP figures out. Were it not for Mandelson, suspect Starmer would be able to talk about turning the economy around and see off leadership disquiet.
Time to dust off the "near-perfect Chancellor" line?
Excellent GDP figures out. Were it not for Mandelson, suspect Starmer would be able to talk about turning the economy around and see off leadership disquiet.
No, no, that can't be right. We all know the country's economy is going down the pan - I read it here on PB every day so it must be true.
Comments
On paper we're doing great. And my credit score is perfect because I keep it that way. But I absolutely struggle to pay the bills - keeping on top of the various income streams and businesses needing working capital. It literally makes me sick. And I know a lot of people working in good jobs who also feel endlessly squeezed.
He needs to go for it now or not at all.
Goes for politics generally, when the opponent is the economy.
Not a military target, just Ukranians sleeping in their beds.
https://x.com/zelenskyyua/status/2054799802563510518
If he stays in post, Labour drops even further in the polls and PM Farage becomes even more likely.
He needs to go. There needs to be a Labour leadership reset otherwise they are doomed to a near total wipeout.
Rayner isn't the solution in anything above a Prescott style attack dog deputy/party chair role
Streeting has the Mandelson problem
Miliband is a blinkered zealot
But they need to lance the Starmer issue and fight it out. Not dealing with him should no longer be an option
Me, i'm doing fine, but near everyone i know stresses.
“I’m somebody who’s quite pugnacious. I used to be a litigation lawyer, so I’m quite adversarial,” he says. “But my experience as mayor has taught me that actually working together achieves far more.”
...
Khan says he works closely with other mayors. “I’m a firm believer in stealing well rather than inventing badly. And so if another city’s doing a great job, I’ll nick it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/11/sadiq-khan-10-years-london-mayor-labour-environment
Watch for it to start ticking up again though, if the problem of the large crappy Chinese batteries isn’t addressed.
The party at the moment is looking for a miracle worker WRT both voters and making all the problems go away. Obviously there isn't going to be one.
More to come I suspect.
1. Rayner is now favourite. With her remarkably well timed HMRC clearance. If only they could be so efficient with my year long requests for foreign tax exemption certificates
She’d be a more awkward customer for Farage and Badenoch than the hapless Starmer. Feisty, female, working class
However there are grave doubts about her competence and there is that Dan Hodges article about her boozing (and many other rumours about her private life)
She’s probably the biggest risk but also the biggest potential upside if she pays off
2. Streeting probably can’t win now. But he should still go for it. Show that he’s got friends and a base in the party. If he does that but loses it means he can’t be idly dismissed. He’d get a cabinet place and might get a second chance. Farage will be relieved. Streeting might have been a trickier customer
3. Burnham. Can’t see him even entering the race. There are no safe constituencies. Rule him out
4. Miliband. An inferior choice to Rayner for Labour lefties. Another north london liberal. Also a rejected retread. A man yet again. He can’t beat Rayner. Farage would love this net zero crank as his opponent
5. Starmer. No. Just no. It’s over. If he stays Farage will again be delighted but I can’t see it. Half his cabinet have asked him to leave - it is untenable
So I make Rayner a pretty clear favourite unless Burnham can quickly get back into the commons. Which he can’t
In part this is from making new regulations and similtaneously cutting local authority and police budgets to the bone so they cannot enforce the rules. So cowboys and crooks get away with it.
Also you can look for other factors such as more smoke alarms fewer old style chip pans being used.
Building regulations may or may not have played a role, but if so it seems to have a pretty small one.
And they can be right or wrong depending on the individual.
I work in a lower paid, less stressful job than I could do. Live in a smaller house in a less posh area than I could do. Drive a smaller, less prestigious car than I could do.
In exchange for having financial assets, more free time and peace of mind.
There’s been an uptick in fires from ultra cheap, low quality products though. Guess what - enforcement is very poor. So garbage with all the certification marks is on sale.
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
So, you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
My guess is she will only go if Streeting goes first. But I could be wrong.
Time to get more popcorn
The whole of Building Regs Approved Document B is dedicated to this and for the most part is a big plus.
Building Regs changes have also driven more energy efficient homes.
OTOH allowing private Building Inspection services to satisfy free-marketeer ideology has unsurprisingly led to compromise in the implementation of Building Regs imo - private inspection companies shy away from upsetting their paying customers.
By the way, more smoke alarms, and smoke alarms wired into the mains rather than on batteries, ARE part of the Building Regulations
My dad says he has never bought a house that he could afford. Historically that has been a great investment, but I am not so sure that it is a wise policy now.
This pusillanimous wanking about is ridiculous. Get on with it
Skyr has completely lost the respect and loyalty of the party and half the Cabinet. Him limping on makes it worse. The bleeding must be staunched
But we learned last night that Burnham has pulled out, as speculation mounts over a potential challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's leadership.
As for actual business, it's no wonder small businesses are going pop at alarming rates. Taxes which have punitive rises (business rates, ENIC), petty, stupid and expensive admin (director IDs where you need to *separately* register your ID as director and then PSC and it practically screams fraud at you because Companies House registered you 3 times).
On Raynor's competence, she's going to need trusted allies to make sure things get done. And she should make sure these are MP cabinet member allies, like Cameron had with Osbourne, not faceless Spads like Starmer adopted.
If she can do that then perhaps she can do the charismatic leader part while ensuring things get done behind the scenes. And probably win a good chunk of Green voters back from the much less likable Polanski.
We are already in a state of political chaos because of Starmer and her
Failure to act only sees that go on and on and on.
We get that she doesn't want to end her career but we are passed that point now
This happens irrespective of what their income is.
Boris is an example of someone who has always lived above his income and pleaded poverty.
He could lose the by election (I suspect that’s highly likely as voters hate Labour so much) then see the manc mayoralty get won by reform. He’d go down as a total loser, disdained by many - whereas right now he is apparently popular
Re the HMRC clearance: I am not surprised. No doubt this has been fast-tracked because HMRC will not want to be seen unnecessarily preventing a possible PM candidate from entering the race. It's a tricky one for them but one has got to ask how it can take more than a day or two for an investigator to review the evidence and make a recommendation.
Once Streeting is in the ring Rayner can come in to "protect" the party from this right wing nutter. I think its more difficult for her if Streeting doesn't have the numbers. Does she stand anyway?
Maybe she's what a middle class Southerner thinks a Northerner should be. To me, she comes across as full of shit.
My mother's someone who's voted for many parties, but I was quite surprised by how much she disliked Rayner as well. Not the biggest sample size, and maybe she'd* do well getting the far left to return from the Greens, but that may come at the expense of centrists and people who know how numbers work.
Labour backbenchers who think their job is to fling money at people and spend ever more could be happy too.
Edited: *Rayner, not my mother. Ahem.
(Sure there's a future thread title there: "Can Rayner win or is she treading a Salt Path?")
It would be good to know what would do differently though.
Unable to work and on UC... not so easy.
Edit: Or indeed working in low-paid employment but still qualifying for UC support...
Burnham should for now settle for backing one of Rayner or Miliband as PM in return for them offering the opportunity for a rapid path back to parliament and in the meantime a temporary ennoblement (which he could renouce in due course to stand in a by-election) to enable him to serve in the Cabinet in the meantime. That does not rule out him becoming PM later in the parliament should Labour fail to rebuild and consolidate support on the left.
Good mornign everyone.
I dunno. She’s way too left for me but I can see her appeal. Straight talking and with some guts. Fought her way up from a very tough background
And of course a woman. Finally a woman leader - and not from london and not middle class. It would be harder for Badenoch to beat her up in the commons (as she is beginning to do to Starmer as she improves). Attacks from Farage might come across as misogyny and/or snobbery
Given the paucity of the choices, if I was a Labour MP I’d likely roll the dice. Get rid of Starmer and install Rayner and then pray to god. It’s not like Labour can afford to do nothing. They are plunging in the polls, sometimes down to 15%
A parliamentary source told The Times: “Al Carns has said ‘he is getting on with doing his job’, but if someone fires the starting gun, he isn’t afraid of gunfire”.
They said the implication was Carns “would throw his hat in the ring should someone trigger a race”.
He is expected to do a short broadcast clip and then a Q&A shortly after 9:30am.
It gives the lie to the argument that huge levels of immigration are needed to make the economy function.
It gives the lie to the argument that huge levels of immigration are needed to make the economy function.
It gives the lie to the argument that huge levels of immigration are needed to make the economy function.
It gives the lie to the argument that huge levels of immigration are needed to make the economy function.
It gives the lie to the argument that huge levels of immigration are needed to make the economy function.
But can he do it fast enough? It all feels a bit unreal and unlikely
I view these paywall bypass websites as a bit like those chipped boxes/firesticks that allow you to watch all the sports for free.
Eventually the authorities and copyright holders will go for them and the people who use them.
Essentially it is stealing revenue which must be annoying when finally media organisations have finally worked out how to make a profit from their websites and apps.
Today, Wes needs to either piss or get off the pot.
If he does pull the trigger, then I'd like to see Mahmood or Phillipson enter the contest too from that wing of the party.
Yeah, I know he was a marine but same starry eyed nitwittery over a sniff of a (wo)man in uniform applied.
Whilst ignoring the catastrophic results last week and pledging No Change. Not even a reshuffle. Not even requiring renewed pledges of fealty from Streeting or Mahmood
AIUI the fines can be seriously nasty
Reddit is telling all its users to quit pasting this stuff
And of course it’s an easy win for governments and police. Just enforce the law and the media will like you more
As a football player he was reportedly a goal hanger of a striker, always looking for a tap in.