Liberal, Briton, ‘Centrist Fun Uncle’. Co-mod of m/neoliberal and c/neoliberal.
This is patently absurd. Labour already inherited the highest tax burden in 70 years from the Conservatives - this budget increases the tax burden by a further £40bn to fund extra spending. Government borrowing is also going to increase by an average of £32bn a year for the next five years due to this budget.
If this is what they call austerity, I’d hate to see what these people think government largesse looks like…
Will the clocks still go back and forward an hour to help the farmers get up early though?
He’s obviously talking his own book, but there does seem to be genuine concern that the government’s analysis of the non-dom crackdown suggests that, yes, it will lead to a reduction in tax revenue. Because many of these people can in fact just move…
A recent migrant, identifying himself as ‘Nigel F from Clacton’, told reporters he was thrilled by his new life in Russia and the prospect of not having to see brown people at the shops or gay people on TV anymore.
Wait, how many 25 year olds in 2024 do you think remember the Mighty Boosh (2003-07), or Chicken Run (2000), or Who Shot Phil Mitchell (2001), or Caroline Quentin-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2000), or know people who were extras in the Harry Potter films (2001-11), or remember the Animals of Farthing Wood TV programme (1993-97), or spilled their drink on Miquita Oliver at a squat party in 2007 (2007)?
This is exactly my issue. I’m not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I’m going to cause an accident because I’m so focused on the speedometer and not the road.
The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers’ subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can’t happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn’t just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.
Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.
Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?
In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.
The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.
Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?
I was disagreeing with you perpetuating the lump of labour fallacy that one can be anti-immigrant for pro-worker reasons.
When nativists use this argument, it’s usually shit-stirrers deliberately trying to pit people against each other. They rely on the fact that the average person probably hasn’t taken the time to conduct a literature review of the economic studies of immigration, but might be able to be seduced by a superficially easy argument that all their ills can be blamed on some minority and drawing on some cherry-picked anecdotes.
The reality of immigration bears little relation to the skewed narrative the nativists are trying to sell. Irregular migration represents only a tiny fraction of UK immigration. Immigrants are no more likely to commit crime than natives. Immigration grows the economy and has little or no effect on jobs and wages. Immigrants are net contributors to the NHS and public services. Once you knock away all the far-right’s factual lies, it’s hard to find the nugget of a ‘legitimate’ reason why people might consider immigration to be one of the major ‘problems’ facing this country that doesn’t start and end with xenophobia.
The idea that the unions would legitimately oppose immigration is nonsense. Economic analysis of the actual impact of immigration has consistently shown that immigration has little-to-no negative impact on the incomes of native workers - immigrants don’t undercut the wages of native workers so the unions shouldn’t be worried about them.
A large part of that is because of the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. Unthoughtful people assume there’s a fixed number of jobs to be filled, but the reality is that immigrants don’t just fill jobs but also create jobs through their own demand for goods and services. But there are other factors too like entrepreneurialism and business start ups - immigrants, as evidenced by them being part of the small subset of people who are prepared to pack up their lives and move to another country, tend to be more entrepreneurial than the general population in either their home or host countries. Some of our biggest high street names like Tesco and M&S have immigrant origins.
The small caveat to this is that immigration in recent decades has been shown to have a tiny negative impact on the incomes of the lowest paid 20% of the population (of about -0.5%) but this is dwarfed by the positive impact it has on those further up the income spectrum (e.g. +1.7% for the richest 10%). Obviously +1.7% of a very rich person’s income is a lot more than -0.5% of a poor person’s income. So if the unions are rational and actually want to improve the lot of the poorest in society then they should be campaigning for a lot more immigration and a very small increase in taxes on the richest to fund redistribution of this income, which will more than compensate the poorest for the fraction of a percentage point of lost income from over two decades worth of immigration.
He didn’t ‘appear’ to justify the rioting.
He literally said ‘of course it’s politically justified!’ There’s no ambiguity here.
No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.
That is obviously untrue. I’m a second-gen immigrant and hard-Remain/Rejoin, Schengen-supporting-as-an-eventual-bridge-to-global-free-movement, neoliberal shill, who disagrees hugely with Labour’s cautious official stance on immigration (although I doubt it’s what Starmer and his senior team - Remain-voting, 2nd referendum supporters to a person - actually believe).
Even I can see that Starmer is a million times better than Farage - the guy who campaigned for a freeze on all non-NHS immigration, a ban on immigrants bringing their partners and children to the UK, supported the Rwanda scheme, and more generally has made a whole career out of demonising immigrants and refugees.
Imagine being so far off to the left than you can no longer tell the difference between Keir Starmer and Nigel fucking Farage 😂
You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…
Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.
By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.
The 1906-22 Liberal-led governments gave the UK progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, the state pension, the first tax-funded healthcare, the end of the primacy of the House of Lords. This was one of the most transformational progressive governments in our country’s history and this is partly why they were winning by-elections in working-class seats right up to the start of the First World War.
I think you’re overestimating the existence of underlying ‘political’ causes of the rise of Labour and underestimating the pure ‘electoral’ factors around the Asquith/Lloyd George split.
Good. It’s bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.
Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let’s get rid of the pension triple lock next please.
The MPs wanted Cleverly anyway but they shit the bed trying to engineer an easy opponent for him in the final two. He’s now said he’s not going to join the shadow cabinet, so while Badenoch has to deal with all the struggles of being LOTO, Cleverly will be on the backbenches, giving speeches to constituency parties, improving his reputation, sounding like some sort of experienced elder statesman to contrast with Badenoch.
A VONC to put Cleverly in charge seems very likely unless Starmer’s polling numbers really tank over the next few years.