There's almost nothing at stake for me personally in any election, so I don't think I've ever voted on those grounds. Country first.Originally Posted by randomlegend
There's almost nothing at stake for me personally in any election, so I don't think I've ever voted on those grounds. Country first.
Presumably their headline policy is to cut import tariffs on all Chinese drop-shipping operations.
Maybe they should have a floor for when VAT becomes payable, to catch the big name players charging 50k a year or whatever, but not so much the weird little independent schools teaching orthodox Jews, or, no wait, let's just lump them all in together.
I'm always struck when I see those little independent schools which look no bigger than a house and wonder who would send their children there? Special children, obviously.
Every kid going to private school is a kid you do not need to subsidize with your taxes.
If you need me to help fund your brat going to posh school, then you shouldn't be sending your brat to posh school.
And if you hire a lawyer to defend you in court you are saving the public money from legal aid costs, but you pay VAT on the lawyer's fees, as it's a service, and whilst the system obviously has many nuances [I think private medical care might be VAT exempt :/] I'm not sure that sort of transactional/ring-fenced funding logic really holds.
VAT on gym membership? Yes if for profit, no if not apparently. Saving the health service money.
What if partially funding "posh school" costs you less than fully funding public school?
If that were the case you could probably come up with a better funding arrangement than a blanket tax break for all who can afford it, depending on your political outlook.
We had this very debate in Guernsey where the government blew up an existing 11-plus/grammar school/state funded places at posh school system and has spent nearly 10 years doing very little in the ensuing clusterfuck.
So Rishi is saying that he didn't have SKY when he was a kid. Wasn't even launched until 1990 when he was 10 and I wouldn't say it was really mainstream in people's homes until what probably the late 90's?
I remember getting Sky whilst there was still BSB and BSkyB [edit, apparently it was just Sky and later merged with BSB], his parents were obviously putting too much family money into his school fees.
WWF on Sky One my first taste.
Last edited by niko_cee; 12-06-2024 at 11:19 AM.
And he still grew up to be a fanny.
We got ours because my old man wanted to watch the West Indies v England series in which we got trounced in the late 90s, so that would have been 97-98 winter.
Quite a big outlay for the privilege of watching Angus Fraser trundle in imo.
The way one would normally brush away the rich boy noise would be to focus on competence, but he can't do that so we are where we are.
The only real reason to get Sky back then.I remember getting Sky whilst there was still BSB and BSkyB [edit, apparently it was just Sky and later merged with BSB], his parents were obviously putting too much family money into his school fees.
WWF on Sky One my first taste.
Attitude Era
I remember when Sky showed up in Mexico and started poaching a couple of football games a week from public TV. I was SEETHING.
Which reminds me of when we had one of those bootleg cable boxes that had all channels unlocked. Playboy TV
They were doing God's work.Which reminds me of when we had one of those bootleg cable boxes that had all channels unlocked. Playboy TV
No 10 minute freeview to put hairs on his chest.
You could get RTL and other European channels on the early sky boxes. Absolute filth.
All went out the window whenever Sky Digital hit.
RTL.
When MTV was channel 14
He's probably got Lucas Paqueta running his polling operation.One of Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aides placed a £100 bet on a July election just three days before the prime minister named the date, the Guardian can reveal.
The Gambling Commission is understood to have launched an inquiry after Craig Williams, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, who became an MP in 2019, placed a bet with the bookmaker Ladbrokes on Sunday 19 May in his local constituency of Montgomeryshire.
It's amazing how much these people in control of a country treat it as absolutely small time.
Part of the problem with politics these days, and part of the reason why politicians are so shit, is that most of the elite class see national politics as small fry and the real money and prestige and power is to be had by rubbing shoulders with 'global', which means American, elites. Also means there are almost no proper patriots in the top echelons of any political party. On the backbenches there are, in all parties.
No prizes for guessing who was the first British PM to think like this but I think it's been true for every one since except Brown and May.
Our Workers Party candidate has just put something through the door calling the Labour bloke an extremist.
Turns out that's Galloway's lot.Their branding seems decidedly 'Join the RAF'.
Was Starmer’s mother a nurse in the NHS?
I think she was a tooltaker.
His reaction to the toolmaker guffawing summed up the man. Not even a semblance of a sense of humour in there.
The more pent-up seethe we have in 2029 the better (assuming somebody can tap it).
Yeah, big labour win with Sir Ed Dayout egging them on to rejoin the EU on a weekly basis has the potential for some fairly ruinous scenes by the end of the decade.
Starmer accuses Sunak of a Corbyn manifesto, then immediately himself pledges to nationalise energy and rail.
Nationalising Rail policies piss me off because they've been doing it under the radar for years. Half the TOCs are run by the state in all but name now anyway.
Renationalisation is proper careful-what-you-wish-for stuff. The state hardly functions as it is.
Works ok up here (I'd rather it be shite and state run than shite and profit run).
This involves Nigel Farage leading the resistance from outside Parliament - and he's going around today suggesting exactly that. Culture wars forever, this time along institutional lines.
Of course he is, he has seen the Trump fundraising model.
It staggers me just how many parties are up for binning Trident off. While I didn't agree with it (as you never know what's round the corner) I could at least understand Henry's take on binning it off all those years ago, but now? Have these people run mad?
It's basically the same as being pro-Russia, China and Iran, and probably Israel while we're at it.
I bet Ukraine would like to swap those Russian assurances about sovereignty for a dozen ICBMs right about now.
Nothing's going to change.
That's what it takes to get elected. The real test is what they actually do.
They know they can get elected whilst also promising basically nothing, so that's what they're doing. It's the smart thing to do. Why make big promises if you don't have to?
As Jim says, the question is; what will they actually do. I don't believe nothing will change. I think they'll attempt quite a bit of change, I just don't think it's going to be popular. The country is in deep trouble, and I'm not sure there's a pain free way through it. Nor am I sure these are the people we want at the wheel for it. But again - as Jim has said - we have no leaders of any real quality left in British Politics. So if not them, who?
Last edited by Spikey M; 13-06-2024 at 08:46 PM.
Indeed. He hasn't had to come off the fence for many things, if any. Just sat back and let Rishi do his own damage. The polls suggest the voters aren't all in on him either, they just want not-Tory.
Once he's in office he won't have such luxuries. I suspect the 2029 election will end in nobody near a majority, unless he's going to suddenly turn into a great PM.
*nods sagely*
Are you going to be involved in the military coup is that more of an army thing?
Where is the money coming from? That’s the problem, no point in promising a load of things they don’t know if the money is even going to be there for.
The Tories are coming out with loads of old shite trying to lay traps for Labour because they know they will never have to cash the cheque. Better to just let them do their thing as it’s not moving the needle at all and then once they are in especially if they have a big majority they can start coming up with actual plans.
On the tax and spend side of things anyway someone needs to just level with the country and explain that either taxes will have to go up across the board or spending cuts are needed it’s one or the other but be honest about it and say to people that’s what needs to happen. We also need to actually tackle the issues of the country rather than just blaming everything on foreigners.
NHS is a prime example it’s a money pit and will continue to be so until we tackle the underlying cause of why it’s a money pit. We are a country of fat cunts who eat terribly, if something was done to try and tackle that issue the cost of the NHS would decrease massively. But nobody wants to tell people stop eating shit because at the end of the day our economy is built on people buying and selling shit they don’t actually have a need for.
The WOKE military haven't got it in them. We might have to go down the Ukraine route of Nigel Farage-aligned paramilitaries.
I wonder how much of the pandemic cost really hit the coffers. Like, I see the number £410bn and it looks massive but has some of that been clawed back?
There's a lot more to it than this.
As medical science improves, the cost of a publicly funded healthcare service will naturally increase for a myriad of reasons.
People live for longer, accumulating numerous health problems which all require treatment. This multi-morbidity is difficult to manage. This is expensive, both because this person requires 30 years more healthcare than they would've in the 50s, but also because that healthcare is far more complex.
New treatments also allow people with certain conditions who would've had a very limited lifespan (potentially even dying in infancy) to live for many years, sometimes virtually a normal lifespan. This is expensive. Take cystic fibrosis as an example. At the start of the last century, it was a death sentence in infancy. Even within the last 50 years people would typically die in their teens or early twenties. Now - with the advent of CFTR modulators - people can have an essentially normal lifespan. That's 80 years of complex, high intensity healthcare and CFTR modulators are costly drugs.
Treatments are more complex. Even in the short time I've been in medicine, the management for something as common and relatively simple as an MI ("heart attack") has exploded in complexity. This is expensive.
Some new treatments are extremely clever, but extremely expensive. E.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64629680
There is a nonsense purveyed by politicians that the NHS constantly requiring more money (in real terms) means something is going wrong. That is not true. Healthcare is simply becoming more expensive because it has more to offer, and people want access to it on the publicly funded service.
If you want 2024 treatment for your heart attack - which is drastically more complex and expensive than 1994 treatment was - then it has to be paid for. Therefore the budget will need to grow in real terms per capita. If you want to pay for the NHS at 1994 levels then it will only be able to offer you 1994 level treatment when you clog up your left descending coronary.
That is absolutely not to say the NHS doesn't have bloat and inefficiency because it absolutely does. Much of it's budget is also wasted dealing with social care issues because the social care budget is inadequate, but that's another story. But ultimately, if you want your baby to be able to have £2m life-saving gene therapy then the demands on funding will continue to grow.
Last edited by randomlegend; 13-06-2024 at 10:11 PM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote