Theresa May's Conservatives
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour
Tim Farron's Liberal Democrats
Paul Nuttall's UKIP
2 people's Greens
Nicholas Durgeon's Scottish Nationalists
Satan's Sinn Fein
Dr Ian Paisley's DUP
Some other bunch of nonces
I'm foreign, but I wish I were an Englishman
I sympathise on house prices, but I borrowed significantly less than I was offered precisely because the margin for error was non-existent. And not because I expected rates to shoot up like this, but just generally, what do you do if your washing machine packs in and you've mortgaged yourself to the hilt?
Isn't that the reality of how a lot of people live though, whether they have a mortgage or not - JAM's, was it?
That seems like a case for lower taxes/better benefits rather than keeping rates low forever.
Presumably people could still afford it if interest rates go up (that's what the [recently-scrapped] affordability tests are about, isn't it?) but it'll be shit having another couple of hindred quid of your income eaten up by your mortgage.Originally Posted by Lewis
Also, for the wider economy, people's disposable income being eaten up by rising mortgage costs, rising energy costs and rising food costs and leaving them with less disposable income can't be good, can it?
Exactly. It's not just mortgages. Someone that took out a mortgage at 0.25% 10 years ago could probably see that 2.5% down the road was a decent possibility, but exponential rises across other essentials (gas, petrol, electricity, food) at the same time? Probably not. Especially alongside stagnant wages in alot of industries. Even those that have had a pay rise (3.5% come @ me bro's), very few people haven't received a substantial real terms pay cut over the last 12 months.
And the ones that haven't have just had their tax cut by 50k per year too, so happy days.
Last edited by Spikey M; 24-09-2022 at 08:14 AM.
This is why we're getting tax cuts and energy support. Is this the ideal time to be putting rates up, no; but when you put it off and off for a decade you eventually lose the luxury of being able to do it on your own terms, and the people who did well out of that are now paying for it (same with all the pandemic support).
Interest rates should have started going up 10 years ago. BoE were an absolute liability in the last decade.
Normally in a recession you’d be cutting interest rates, and we’ve squandered one of the only tools we had to fight it in that regard.
Well, I'd love to see Ol' Kwasi K wriggle his way out of THIS jam.
All the main papers are on board with this budget so they’ll bury it.
Do people really believe that he has colluded with that investment fund to deliberately do something that won't benefit the economy (and therefore his political party, and therefore his career, and therefore his future capacity to collude with investment funds) for twenty grand? Last week it was Truss not imposing a windfall tax because she worked for Shell when we were at primary school, because her loyalty is apparently to them rather than wanting to be Prime Minister for more than a year.
Massive Attack leading the charge
Sounds like a Football Manager tactic.Massive Attack leading the charge
No but that’s besides the point. The papers have form for ending careers for things more trivial than this. My reply was just highlighting that no major publication will even bring light to it so it won’t get off the ground, even though this kind of thing has happened plenty of times when it suits.
Obviously not. Engaging in insider trading for personal profit, however...
Twitter coming up with 45 to the question of 1+1 again. How shocking.
As far as I can see it's a punt, on the basis that they think they are electorally fucked and their only hope is to get slightly more money into people's pockets between now and 2024 than would otherwise be the case. A forlorn punt, I think.
They think that it will grow the economy, because the Conservative Party can't think beyond tax cuts and more immigration as means of growing the economy. It's not a conspiracy. This is what they believe.
The time machine they've built to take him and his tips back to 2011 would surely make more money for all parties.
Not like he is an incompetent politician looking to feather a nest for when his political career crashes and burns.
I checked my porfolio (such a wanky word) this morning and was surprised to see my Yank stocks in the green, considering how the markets are bleeding. I had a quick look and it's purely down to "FX impact", which is the difference between the £:$ when I bought and the £:$ now.
6% on some of them. That's a bit scary.
Considering the dollar is the international currency for trade, that's going to make barrels of oil / litres of gas, etc even more expensive. Nice to see Liz Truss ignoring economists paying off.
Just found one at nearly 10%. Jesus. Our Currency will end up pegged to the Turkish fucking Lira for stability by the end of this parliament.
There's a real danger of it falling below parity and shit will properly hit the fan then. I mean, we're way down on a decade ago anyway so things are already shit but it will be such a symbolic event that markets will get spooked further.
I was surprised to drive around France and see petrol as low as 1.33 (euros) at times. Are we taxing it higher or what?
The RAC did a report a while ago saying that the oil price had gone down but our forecourts had not tracked the price decrease. Basically just another example of rip off Britain.
BP are steadily dropping a penny a week. It’s obviously cheaper now but they get away with it because as a country we accept it. The French would be rioting at £1.79.
Kuenssberg is a right joke. She grills Starmer, the opposition, about how long energy support should last beyond April, but is all “wel dun m8” to Kwarteng about tax cuts.
Starmer going all God Save the King seems to have brought Labour Republicanism into focus. Whilst I sympathise with the cause, to an extent, are they just trying to find new and improved ways to make themselves forever unelectable?
One of the reasons I would like to see Labour get in next time (aside from giving new Tory talent a few years to develop) will be to see what lefty twitter does. Will they do a volte face and suddenly become pro-the British government on every issue, or break down into nuance and wish it were Corbyn?
Nobody better at fighting the left than the left. It’s why the conservatives always get back in. They’ll follow any idiot over the cliff.
Interesting to note that Labour have only said they would reverse the cut to the top rate, having shit all over the wider package as risky and all the rest. Obviously that five per cent of the cost was the main worry and spooking the currency. My remaining - that is to say made up to justify it - fear of a Labour government, now that the Conservative Party has legalised crime and wants to turn us into India, would be letting them have another rape of the constitution. Everything else would just be the same but gayer.
How do you have gay tax cuts? Reduced VAT on tapdance lessons? Subsidised knitting lessons?
@Lewis
Can you tell us how policing is handled politically (in your opinion). Because in my simpleton world I’d just recruit more officers and have them “visible”. You’d think higher police officer numbers and the subsequent “tough on crime” stance would do wonders for your poll ratings.
The law 'n' order issue is an excellent example of how the right is functionally useless beyond cutting taxes. Conservative politicians like to whinge about 'woke' policing like the coppers themselves come into work and decide to police like melts, rather than being legally obligated to spend increasing amounts of their time on hurt feelings and recruit women with degrees instead of people who can actually batter shoplifters (I feel like a lot of visibly crap policing is down to coppers being unable to back themselves in a physical confrontation). Unless you amend/repeal the various New Labour laws that you have spent twelve years moaning about the effects of, nothing will change.
As for me, I would be more than happy to send fewer people to prison, but the people who do get sent down for serious offences should be in there for longer. I would also like to see hanging brought back for murderers, and even introduced for particularly bad nonces, but we might just have to dream about that one.
We don't need more police, we just need our police to actually be police, rather than spending 90% of their time acting as mental health support workers and the remainder of their time dancing at various festivals and carnivals to show how lovely they are.
Yeah, people seem to conflate the creaking legal system and terrible prisons, which do need more money (why we run haunted old expensive prisons in city centres instead of building a few mega prisons in Liberal Democrat constituencies is beyond me), with wanky policing, which isn't about money.
Why don’t they just go and repeal the wanky New Labour laws, then? If that’s the problem with policing.
Who knows. It could be incompetence, whether through not knowing how power works or subscribing this weird idea that the state can only reform one thing at a time ('bandwidth'), or maybe they just agree with it all deep down and just want to make a show of complaining and expecting crime to be prevented/solved. It's the same with the migrants coming over the water. It can only be solved by repealing certain laws, but they want to try literally everything else first.
This is what I don’t get. If they can’t / don’t want to change the laws of policing then just do something purely that you *can* control. Go ahead and sky rocket copper numbers and wear it as a badge of honour when it comes round to election time. Instead, they end up doing nothing and everyone comes out of it looking like mugs.
Some of my family are in the police and they keep telling me how frighteningly incompetent some parts of West Midlands Police are. In my (possibly wrong) view, coppering seems to be one of the easiest things to get right. How did Theresa May / the government think reducing numbers after 2010 was going to go down well?
Then again, they’ve won every election since so maybe they got right.
They've won those elections because Labour have been absolutely useless in offering a credible alternative, not because they've particularly done much right.
Other than 2017. Corbyn was very much a credible alternative at that point. He didn't torpedo himself until the Salisbury poisonings.
He was never a credible alternative, as his election results show.
While our media are all gushing for the Tories it is pretty much impossible to have a credible Labour leader. Even eating a sandwich "wrong" is fatal.
There's a programme on iPlayer about Murdoch and his influence. Tony Blair may have actually sucked him off to get him onside.
It's a dogshit and unfair situation, but I guess that's one of the reasons Blair was so successful, he understood pragmatism. Everyone since (with the possible exception of Starmer) didn't seem to get it at all.
He forced May into deepthroating the DUP strap on.
Which does not a credible alternative make. He got more seats in 2017 than people were expecting, but that's literally it.
They did well in 2017 because they gave both sides of Brexit the impression that they were going to do what they wanted. I think they would have got away with it for the most part as well, but would have then lost the 2022 election for literally every other reason.
To be fair this is the electorate that believed 'chaos with Ed Milliband' and has continued to fall for similar wanky slogans 'Strong and Stable' despite all evidence to the contrary. The only reason Starmer might net more seats than Corbyn is he is up against the literal skidmarks on the worn underpants of the Conservative party.
Credible alternatives don't need to win. Labour had a massive surge in popularity in the campaign to the point they gained almost as many popular votes as the Conservatives, who then needed the psychos in NI to form a Government. I don't know what more an alternative would need to do to qualify as credible. Whether Labour would have been a car crash in power or not is besides the point.
They really do and if they were credible, particularly up against the shitshow the Tories have put forward, they would have done.
If elections were decided by popular votes that would be relevant, as it is, it isn't.
Win.
I appreciate this might be veering into the same territory as Steve Bruce being a good manager or not, but the left seemed to be plagued by not understanding that winning is everything, which is so frustrating as they can't do anything without it.
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