Panto_Villan

Stevie allegedly also had a local fixer deal with an aggressive criminal who had been threatening him to try and make a name for himself. Provided a letter or good character for the guy when he went on trial. I remember reading the fixer and some buddies shot the guy in the face with a shotgun, but from a distance so it wasn't too damaging.

The strengths of the UK in banking weren’t really built on the tax regime. If people went where tax rates were lowest then all the bankers would be in Dubai. The UK in general got a lot of business being the English speaking gateway into Europe, in a time zone midway between the US and Asia, and a well-established legal framework. For example - most of the EU Euro denominated bonds were traded in London, but the EU has (or will) change the rules so that’s no longer possible. My mate is a very successful banker and he sees very little value in the bonus cap being removed. Bankers base salaries have already ballooned to make up for the reduced bonuses, and it’s not like the rules affected hedge funds etc anyway. Businesses and rich people would much rather have a stable business and investment environment than handouts, anyway. There’s really no winners when you’re putting out policies like these.

Yes, the Ukraine situation is another concern I’d have had with Corbyn. Re: the EU, I think there’s value in having the Tories in power after Brexit (especially with Corbyn being more Eurosceptic than the Labour Party in general). It makes the inevitable betrayal narrative less convincing. Brexiteers would love to foist Brexit on the country, then hand it over to Labour with all its unsolvable contradictions. That way they could complain forever about whatever solution Labour came up with and blame all future problems on that.

Under Starmer, or indeed any Labour general election candidate since Blair other than Jeremy Corbyn? No, of course not. But what’s unfolding here is the catastrophic “stubborn leader who doesn’t believe in orthodox economics” scenario, which is a major reason why large numbers of people would rather hold their noses and vote for Boris rather than see Corbyn in office. In fact, Corbyn could actually have been worse than this. Not necessarily because of his ideas, but simply because he’d have a full four year term and a mandate. Hopefully the fact Truss is an unelected leader means she’ll face a major rebellion if she carries on down this path.

So let’s say you’re a Tory strategist - what’s your best plan at this point (aside from jumping out of a window)? Immediate vote of no confidence? Stick with Truss and hope everyone has forgotten about this in two years time? Those polls are showing an extinction level event right now.

Agreed. The idea that someone would never vote for one of the two major parties in our country, irrespective of what policies / actions the other might take, is not something to be celebrated. Democracy relies on people changing their votes based on how the different parties perform.

There’s sort of a web of interconnected effects. Technically a house is a good thing to hold during inflation because logically it should retain its relative value with inflation, while the outstanding amount of the mortgage is being eroded by inflation. In a vacuum you could theoretically keep remortgaging the increased value to help with the increased payments (unlikely to be viable in practice, but still interesting I think). Also if you’re employed you’d expect wage increases to somewhat keep pace with inflation, so you’d expect people to be able to keep up on their mortgages if they are employed unless they have very little disposable income and can’t cut back at all if their wages get eroded a bit. Unemployment is a killer though because then people are reliant on savings to keep up their payments, and that’s when houses get repossessed in large numbers.

The problem with this is the valuations. It’d be pretty much impossible (not to mention extremely tedious) to reliably calculate your net wealth every year. How much has your laptop or phone depreciated this year? Do fluctuations in the commodities market mean your wedding band has increased in value this year, or does the scratch it got this year cancel that out? Whereas PAYE is a straightforward way for the government to calculate and collect the right amount of money each month. And it also doesn’t mean that tax take falls to zero during a recession when the price of assets decreases.

Yes, this is true and is an interesting debate. I read a long article about it a few months ago that made some good points. Stamp Duty also discourages people from moving from areas with few jobs to more jobs, which is another economic harm. But abolishing it does also require an increase in council tax and then that extra element being diverted to the central government - and higher taxes on house worth would be politically unpopular, and depress house prices too so I can’t see it happening. One reason why SDLT is unlikely to disappear is that it’s one of the easiest taxes to collect and it’s impossible to fiddle. Unlike with council tax where there’s a subject element to the valuation, this just goes on the sale price and the government can refuse to transfer ownership until it gets paid. So it’s very efficient in that regard.

This is a good point, although I’m not sure your point about household income vs national holds here - as you say, it’s still a good idea for a household to take out loans for valuable education or tools that increase your earnings in the long run. National finances work the same in that regard. The question mark regarding the tail end of new Labour is whether that borrowed money would be put to an economically productive use. Because lots of physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, broadband etc) falls into that category but there’s only so much of that stuff and it’s much more debatable whether services do the same - whether say throwing money at the NHS provides the same long term economic benefits, or just improves peoples lives a bit during the period that the increased spending occurs - a bit like a cheap Netflix subscription you still can’t really afford, to use your household analogy.

Ah, I stand corrected. Thanks for the heads up.

My knowledge of this is kinda limited too, but I’ve seen a couple of theories mentioned. Attacks were at depths of about 50m so apparently plain old divers could do it. The other theory I’ve seen suggested is the Russians just pumped more and more gas until the pipe ruptured, so no actual attack needed. No idea if that is feasible though.

If you’re trying to imply the US is behind the attacks that makes no sense. They could end Nord Stream 2 with sanctions alone, whereas a military attack in the territory of their allies would be a massive diplomatic incident if it were revealed. There’s no reason for them to use military force here.

He totally has. He’s completely turned off the gas flows about a month ago and now he’s literally blown the pipelines up. Edit: and also Europe already has their storage levels at 80%+ which is more than enough to see us all through winter. If there’s a problem it’ll be next winter.

A good point was made by @magnkarl above which is worth expanding on. The only plausible scenario for Putin getting a reasonable result from the war m was an economic victory - holding Ukraine to a relative stalemate and hoping a severe winter in Europe makes the West start to pressure Ukraine into making peace. It’s not likely, but it’s not utterly far fetched either. A far right government has just taken over in Italy, and Trump might win the presidency in the US. Problem is, if people in Europe start demanding we try to make peace and get cheap gas from Russia again - well Putin has just blown up the pipelines so that’s not even an option any more. Bit of an own goal that.

Yeah, I’m not completely sure about how gas pipelines work but I know the flow was cut off some time ago. I suspect they have to keep gas in the pipeline even if nothing is flowing though, else the water pressure would crush the pipe. So that’s what we’re seeing escaping maybe?

Why? It’s two gas pipelines owned by Russia through which nothing was flowing. It’s a move that shows the potential for escalation without actually really escalating - which is what Putin has been doing this whole time. If he’d attacked one of the pipes carrying Norwegian gas to Europe then there’d be serious discussions going on about what was going to happen next.

Yeah, I agree. I’m not necessarily a FPTP supporter, just pointing out that the system does have some advantages and PR has some disadvantages that I hadn’t seen discussed. I voted against AV under the coalition when the Lib Dems had a vote on it, I think I’d vote differently today. While countries like Italy are a complete mess, moving away from FPTP seems the best way to prevent a US style polarisation of politics. An inflow of new ideas is probably necessary in the long term.

I do see where you’re coming from on this but personally I disagree. I’d much rather have two opposing political parties sending policy lurching from one side to the other every 5-10 years than the country running on autopilot and nothing new ever happening. Given most parties can’t even form complete consensus within their own ranks I think multi-party legislation is just kinda unrealistic. And the incentives are skewed - say the Tories needed Lib Dem assistance to pass a climate bill, do you think the Lib Dems would do it, even if it were of value to the county? Probably not because they’d be accused of propping up a Tory government and spend another decade in the electoral wilderness. Another example is the pension triple lock in Britain. Eventually some politician is going to have to take the very unpopular decision to deal with the endlessly rising costs this is causing, because it’s not fair for society. Building a multi-party coalition to do it? No chance. Nobody would have enough political capital under a PR system unless they win a massive plurality of the vote. I know the US system isn’t dysfunctional because of PR, but the fact a president who won both chambers can’t just pass a law to reduce emissions and make abortion legal is crazy to me. Having politicians that can’t deal with things is asking for disaster in the long term imo. We no longer have the EU to make big decisions for us, either. However at the same time I really don’t like the way with FPTP that new parties can’t emerge. When an election is Boris vs Corbyn you really see the limitations of that system too. No chance at all of a Macron figure sweeping to power, for example.

The post wasn’t criticising the wisdom of taking vaccines.

Sure, and no doubt there will be questions asked. But in general you’ll get more right than wrong if you side with the experts. However, it’s also worth qualifying exactly how much the experts “got this wrong” here too. Because lots of people were claiming that Russia wouldn’t actually attack Ukraine, or that it would be an operation with quite limited aims such as only taking control of the Donbas so it could be formally annexed (which is what the previously quoted post was talking about). Its pretty clear that the US intelligence community had a copy of the Russian invasion plan before the invasion happened, and the main variable they were trying to guess was just when Putin was going to pull the trigger. That would be considered a huge intelligence coup in most armed conflicts, right? Think about the Enigma machine, etc. Obviously the invasion plan failed disastrously - but one of the officials hauled up in front of the US Intelligence Committee pointed out that they’d penetrated the Russian military and reported back what the Russians genuinely believed their forces were capable of, as well as when and where they would attack. So while there’s always room for improvement, it seems a lot to expect that your intelligence services know the capabilities of the enemy forces better than the enemies themselves do. And it also doesn’t give them credit for everything they did get right, which is a lot.

It’s an interesting discussion. To be honest I’m not really sure where I stand on the matter but the main point in favour of FPTP that politicians don’t bring up (because it sounds self-serving) is it reliably produces governments that are capable of taking action. Theres quite a few nations with PR that go without governments for years at a time because nobody ever wins an outright majority and coalitions can be hard to agree on. I think Belgium went three years without a government recently, maybe? Brexit has basically paralysed the government since it happened - imagine that, but forever. That’s the possible potential downside of a PR system to go alongside the advantages of better representation.

Well indeed, that’s kinda my point. This forum is very pro-vax and anti-Brexit so it’s a bit weird to call someone out for listening to experts in this case while complaining bitterly that people don’t listen to experts elsewhere.

Nothing in that quotes post was untrue though. That was what the think tanks predicted, that was the Russian goal and how they went about doing it. And nobody did know the outcome for sure. Again, if you’re trying to criticise me for reading up on what respected think tanks (and the Pentagon) thought about the matter then I’m not going to apologise; they’re the experts here even if they do get it wrong once in a while.

Ukraine making another push near Kharkiv before the conscripts start arriving. Not shown on the map is a reported Ukrainian attack a bit further north from Kupyansk.