The delivery isn't great, but she's not wrong.
The delivery isn't great, but she's not wrong.
She came up on YouTube the other day doing something with Sargon of Akkad, who I remember from the days of the Atheism vs Theology debates (cringe days indeed). Apparently he's pretty far right these days. Kicked out of UKIP for saying there's not enough beer in the world for him to rape Jess Phillips
That seems an odd path to take for someone from the Atheist side of the debate, but regardless, Truss knocking about with him tells me she has essentially taken the Russell Brand approach to being in shambles, and is now heading as far right as she needs to go until someone pats her on the head and says she didn't break the economy.
Sadly it is where the money is.
I know a fair bit about Liz Truss and I have it on good authority that she is desperately, desperately unintelligent, to the point where it's amazing she got into any kind of white collar work at all, let alone a politician, let alone somehow having become Prime Minister. It's not even like Trump who is portrayed as stupid but obviously has a sort of malign cunning that has got him to where he is. Truss I think is just a completely empty shell, and ended up where she was purely because Tory MPs are weird as fuck public schoolboys and have this odd sexual thing about right wing women leaders (they all fancied Thatcher rotten), and they somehow ended up projecting that onto her. She isn't even right wing of course, she's just a blank sheet of paper, like a glass of water with no water in it.
Anyway, if you're that stupid and it catches up with you and you find yourself hoyed out of being Prime Minister after three weeks, and then lose your seat, what is a girl to do? The answer is just chase the US cash because the money is there and enough of them don't know who she is that she can sell herself to the vast right wing ecosystem there as 'The Woman Who British Socialists Love To Hate', or whatever. Lovely cash that doesn't need any intellectual expenditure (which is just as well because she isn't capable of it) and cash that of course just isn't on offer in this country. She'll appear with Darth Vader, Hitler, whoever if the money's there.
Farage also loves the same cash, absolutely adores it, but because he's accidentally become an MP and now a party leader, and because he's got a lot more about him than Truss has, he finds himself in a slightly more difficult position.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 18-01-2025 at 02:10 PM.
This is like something I would make up as a lol 'country is finished' complaint.
Imagine if they could tax the rich. Free Ooni pizza ovens for everyone!
That headline picture is fantastic, by the way.
This is actually the scourge of local government let's say an air-fryer costs £60 and they are giving away 6000 of them. That's £360,000 pissed up the wall. All because someone is a pensioner and for no other reason. It's just absolutely batshit.
The local version that irritates me is the local police station giving people free faraday bags for their car keys: if you can afford a decent enough car that you have keyless entry then you can afford £10 for a bag.
It's not the council's business whether old people save money or not. It's the council's business to run services.
Assuming a stubborn pensioner won't just return to the oven because, "It doesn't taste right in the air fryer." Or they can't figure out how to work it. Or they sell it back.
It's to help them because the fuel allowance was cut.
Jesus Christ aim your disdain at the ultra rich.
Pensioners are the ultra rich. It's under 30s who need that £360,000 for, you know, transport to get them to work, and so on. Old people cooking food simply is not important at all.
The idea that pensioners are all rich that seems to infest this forum is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Are some? Of course. Should the rich ones get a state pension or a free air fryer? Absolutely not.... but the idea that they're all shitting gold having stolen our futures is the sort of stuff the BNP would have built a manifesto on were we talking about non-white people.
I assume the ones being bought air friers are not at the wealthy end of the age cohort. But yeah, I largely agree, and most of the shit the elderly get needs to be means tested like the fuel allowance now is. Vince Cable can stick his bus pass up his arse.
Though it's changing rapidly, here anyway. We're coming into the first generation of large-scale renting pensioners now.
Then I would question the logic of them getting the most governmental help. Or, atleast, help others aren't entitled to. Alot of it stems from war veterans / widows reaching retirement age with fuck all to retire on. That obviously isn't the case anymore and their benefits need looking at because of that.
Why do I not get a bus pass, but they do? Why isn't my wage triple locked? Why do they get fuel allowance if they're poor, but poor Yevrah wouldn't?
Age is a very stupid way of deciding what benefits people are entitled to. Everything should be means tested.
This shit is mental too. If I wanted to buy that house, it would cost north of £350k. But for over 60's? £258k. Fuck off.
Most, but definitely far from all pensioners are not in a position where they are hard up. Those who are hard up are generally those who are not lucky enough to own their own home or for whatever reason are single. There was a comment piece in the Times over the weekend explaining how the triple lock is almost like a cult now. Which it is, nobody dare go near it because it will be massively unpopular but nobody is turning around and saying that this is going to make the State Pension unaffordable and we need to do something about it before it spirals out of all control. But, as with everything that is the next government's problem so can be kicked down the road.
I can use two examples from my family. My dad no private pensions to talk of. But, he bought his house in the early 90's for about £60k because of where he lives it's now worth probably £750,000. If he was desperate in retirement he could sell that house and downsize but he doesn't want to. Fair enough but if he ever moans about being hard up I will immediately point back to him that he does have significant wealth no matter how it was achieved. My in laws receive £24,000 State Pension, my father in law then receives just under £30k from his final salary pension as well as having a house worth about £400k and another £150k worth of investments. Could his State Pension be means tested slightly? You fucking bet it could and it wouldn't impact on his standard of living in the slightest.
That's where this comes from, there are people who genuinely do struggle and should be given far more support but there are also millions of people who own their own homes and have significant assets in one way or another who absolutely should not be receiving as much as they do from the state.
Last edited by Luke Emia; 20-01-2025 at 10:24 AM.
Those lifetime lease things seem a right scam. You are paying two thirds of the apparent market price of the house to not own it. It's just like paying 'a lifetime' of rent upfront.
Oh they absolutely are, you just get scammed a bit less if you're old.
Part owners at our age are being taken the piss out of. Even if you starecase up to 100% ownership, you own nothing. You just own the entirety of the lease. They still own the land and you pay ground rent and maintenance and insurance and whatever the fuck until you die. BUT all the responsibility for repairs is yours as if you did own it.
All the downsides of being an owner and all of the downsides of being a renter, with none of the benefits.
I'm a shared owner (I have 60%) and to be honest I'll take it over full renting any day of the week.
But you are renting Jim. In the eyes of the law you own 60% of the lease, but not one single brick.
I don't know the ins and outs of shared ownership, but that seems intuitively less of a rort. Other than lifetime surety of tenancy I don't see what benefits you get. You see it on massive houses in the country round here. What sort of over 60 needs a £1.2m [reduced from £1.8m] 5 bedroom country house? And surely anyone with £1.2m to drop on a property isn;t going to 'buy' something they won't eventually own. I just find it mind boggling.
Jim's being conned but is in denial about it.
Whatever the merits or lack of of Ed Miliband's 'Mansion Tax' proposal, I always remember lolling at the government claiming millionaire pensioners having to sell their homes was equivalent to burning them out of them whilst - entirely correctly - using the exact same logic to forcibly downsize housing benefit claimants with extra bedrooms.
Also with pensioners. They are fucking obsessed with not paying tax, literally everyone I see when they retire wants their cake and eat it in terms of having a big pension pot worth a few hundred grand or savings and not wanting to pay tax on their income, or capital gains tax or inheritance tax. This is most likely driven by seeing the mega rich getting away with paying fuck all in tax for as long as they can remember. Actually getting it taxed and doing away with all these loopholes that have existed to help the mega-rich but now literally anyone and everyone is trying to get away with using them would help massively.
As it stands as well part of the issue in this country is self-employed(me included), when everyone was PAYE the government just collected the money and there were no scams to get out of paying the taxman. Fuck me the stuff you can get away with being self-employed is incredible and again we are only being driven to do that because it helps big business.
I often wondered how my dad could stop working in his mid-40s and still have money to fall back on. Then I remember he started work at 14. They live longer, they work longer, they save harder.
Rachel Reeves going full anti-bat. What a legend.
Twitter is in full meltdown over it too.![]()
Yeah, I see the greens have predictably gone mental. Unfortunately they display the same level of ignorance as regards the issue as they level at those they accuse of being at war with nature display. Neither the bats, nor the idea or even the legislation protecting them is the issue. It is the fanatical nimbys and the Kafkaesque administrative burdens they have created who have put them on this front line by rather hijacking the issue.
Get the ecologists up against Boydy's wall/in the gulag.
'The Greens are always wrong' is the most surefire bet in politics.
Also backpedalling on Trump. Big day for Labour.
I'm awarding Giggles the e-victory on that one.
Taking on the bats? I never thought I'd see that day. I wonder if Labour haven't been emboldened a bit in recent days by Trump's start to his second term. Whatever one thinks of him (hello RL) he seems to have tried to do more in what, two weeks, than Labour have in six months. Maybe it's dawned on them that as the party in power, they should actually use that power a bit more.
They have said they will support Heathrow expanding 'in line with legal environmental and climate objectives', which means they want to offer short-term reassurance to 'investors' but will then sit and do nothing when it eventually gets judicial reviewed into the bin by Chris Packham.
I'm normally against political violence, but if anyone stepped up to pop Ed Miliband from the oh-so-grassy knoll I'd buy them a brie and bacon baguette.