Is Starmer really preparing the ground for more austerity? Is that actually what's happening? I voted for a former member of Manchester council to be my MP, I don't think I've ever debased myself to such an extent before, and this is what it's gotten me?
It's not austerity, but the budget will be very tight. The previous government built up a colossal amount of debt due to covid and the energy support scheme and interest rates have gone up, which gives the new government much less leeway to borrow for day-to-day spending. Unlike in 2010, we just don't have the option of spending a lot more.
The government can (and will) put up taxes, it can invest in infrastructure that will improve productivity and grow the economy over time, but if it spends more on services without a plan to pay for it, then the inevitable result will be high inflation and high interest rates. Sorry, that's just how it works. Liz Truss thought she could ignore the economists and make a load of unfunded tax cuts, but the consequences were exactly what the economists had predicted. We'd get exactly the same outcome if Starmer tried to push through a load of unfunded spending.
>>99874 We have two potential issues when it comes to borrowing. Let's set aside for a moment that by necessity borrowing more will be more expensive due to the mechanism it actually takes.
First is the issue of borrowing to spend. The rolling-over of existing bonds and meeting the public-sector borrowing requirement. The PSBR is, put simply, what needs to come from the issue of debt to make the books balance day-to-day. Government finances are not like household accounts, but they are still subject to the caveat they can't spend money they don't have. This is the side where Truss fucked it. Bond investors went into panic, because she wanted to fund tax cuts through borrowing, which doesn't bode well for being able to redeem those bonds down the line. Our "rates" (it's an auction, details are tl;dr) on these are not exactly disastrous, but they're not great. We've got room to improve on these, but they're heading in the right direction. If we can stave off having to issue more bonds than we need at current prices in the hope of getting better prices in a few months time, then we're good.
The other half of the problem is borrowing to invest. Normally, this is quite easy, because when you're borrowing for specific investments, there's an end goal in mind and a return on that investment that the government will reap in the long term. Could be as simple as just growth, but could be anything. The Truss thing complicates this, but it's not the real problem. See, this is the side where everyone else fucked it. The problem is that we've undertaken big projects for significant investment, and not achieved the goals that were set out. The question investors will be asking on this isn't "will the money be used responsibly", it's "will this investment come to fruition and deliver a return". And our recent record in this area is ... not great. The Sunak ministry made a massive success of doing nothing, and even cancelling things that were already substantially in progress.
It seems as though the new government is making headway on convincing bond investors that there are adults running the place again, but we've got some way to go in persuading them that we can do what's needed for successful investment. It looks like this is the point of the energy co-investment scheme that's been put forward. It's there to demonstrate to the sort of investors that would buy bonds issued for capital projects that we can deliver them.
>>99872 It's not really a good look, showering money on public sector workers and union cronies before saying there's nothing left for everyone else and cutting support for pensioners, all the while blaming it on the Tories. I suppose if they're gonna funnel wealth to their mates, it's better to do it to public sector workers than those who are already rich but it feels like Labour have pissed most of the goodwill they had when they came to power up against the wall.
>>99875 >I feel like political memes aren't as subtle as they used to be.
That's because we're doing that American thing where half the population gets schizophrenia.
>>99883 OAPs care, because the tall tale that's reaching them is "they're taxing your pension now and they're getting rid of the winter fuel allowance".
Also "illegals" is a vile term. I can't think of anything more insidiously dehumanising.
>>99883 >I dunno why people are so angry about the fuel thing. Poor pensioners still get it, so who cares?
To be eligible for pension credit you need an income below £11,340 for a single person or £17,310 for a couple. I think the latter is about in line with the definition of pensioner poverty, so the concern is that a lot of people near the breadline are going to miss out on support they need. I'm not against means testing it, but the threshold should have been set higher than this.
Labour haven't announced many things yet, but the ones they have are releasing prisoners, cutting winter fuel eligibility, public sector wage rises and making it easier for migrants to get social housing. The rest seems to be waiting for the budget, but evidently these ones are their major priorities. The prison one makes perfect sense, but the others are a little questionable.
>I dunno why people are so angry about the fuel thing
Some of it is far left Green and Corbynista types. That I can understand. But most of it is bad faith criticism from people who would be defending it if the Tories had done it. You can tell by how it comes in the same breath as "splurging money on the public sector" when the recent pay awards barely even cover the last couple of years of inflation, let alone the last ten years their pay has seen real terms cuts.
But apart from that, old people being vulnerable paupers is one of those myths that just won't budge, like how most people think the pyramids were built by slaves. They have little reason to re-examine that belief, it's just what they were told, never questioned it, and the assumption it's true is something they've just had there in the back of their mind all their lives. Even if they are presented evidence that it's objectively untrue, they will go "huh, that's wierd" and then within three days it will have fallen out the other ear.
How exactly does one end up getting less than the state pension, anyhow? Come to think of it I've never really understood what the point of national insurance is because as far as I'm aware you still get benefits whether you've paid it or not.
Frankly that's what labour can do if they want to be smart, just scrap national insurance and use it as a smokescreen for their tax rises. Then they can justify means testing too without the "I've paid in all my life!" nonsense from people who don't realise they've paid in less than they're getting out.
>>99888 The old basic state pension is £169.50 a week, compared the new state pension of £221.20 a week. It's more likely to be those who reached state pension age before 2016 or who didn't work because they were a housewife or something who are below the pension credit amount.
If anyone after 2016 has less than the full state pension then it's probable that they either retired early or they were opted out of the additional state pensions (which should mean they'd have enough private pension income not to need pension credit).
>>99881 I assume that "illegals" refers to substances rather than people, because only daft cunts refer to people as "illegals", in which case billions for subsidised weed, coke, speed, ket, etc. is something I can get on board with.
>>99892 I understand passing all the unpopular laws now so that voters have forgotten them by the next election, but there's no way they can be thinking of that. The only people who would want to see that are people who never go to pubs. I go to pubs a lot, and they're awful now. The only people who go to pubs are wretched deadbeats. I oppose all laws that will discourage normal people further from going to pubs. Ban dating apps, ban anywhere else you can make friends, legalise ordering takeaways straight to the pub so you can eat it there if you really want to nanny-state us all into getting our social lives back. But your post just has to be wrong somehow; I refuse to believe it.
>>99894 They're quoting an article in The Sun, who are also running the story that Labour are going to increase fuel duty on petrol and diesel by between 5p and 10p per litre.
I should add that I don't really think they're going to, I just got quite agitated upon seeing it. For one thing it would be completely impractical, all you'd have is people standing just at the boundary of the beer garden, and smoking there. Then they'd have to make some sort of law about that, so people would just move a few feet further. Which would make the smoking shelter IT Crowd bit very accurate.
I'm not even a full time smoker nowadays, I quit years ago and nowadays the only time I'll smoke is when I am sat in a beer garden in the sun with a cold pint on one hand and a ciggie in the other. But it is one of life's little pleasures, one of the things that I cherish disproportionately for how mundane of an act it is. If the government took that away from me I'd be very cross.
>>99897 Since when has a law being being completely impractical and escalating state overreach ever stopped anyone?
>Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed the government is looking at tougher rules on outdoor smoking to reduce the number of preventable deaths linked to tobacco use. Under new plans, smoking could be banned in pub gardens, outdoor restaurants, and outside hospitals and sports grounds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg79ym5mrzyo
Maybe Starmer's Labour are all "Red Tories", but in the sense that a bunch of actual Tories infiltrated the party to do massively unpopular things like kill the elderly, stop people smoking outdoors and deliver speeches so diabolically miserable you'd think they were tailor made to get NHS waiting lists down by making people off themselves? It certainly doesn't feel terribly D:ream of them.
Perhaps pub gardens can be split into two tiers. One where you can’t smoke and one where you have to pay a little towards the budget deficit but then you are allowed to smoke.
And maybe be a bit overdramatic by mandating this sign denoting the smoking area.
Emissions in an enclosed smoke filled room are after all above anything that occupational health and safety standards nowadays normally permit without some kind of breathing protection. The particulate dust concentration alone would see any factory shut down.
The smokers are already paying £8.45 in tobacco duty on every packet of fags, so we should charge the non-smokers. The bloody freeloading non-smoking scum will probably live long enough to claim a pension too.
>>99901 >>99903 >Emissions in an enclosed smoke filled room
No, the last Labour government banned those so we never got a third season of The Smoking Room. You all knew Labour would be like this, don't try and deny it.
Being rid of the Conservatives for the time being is still a good thing, on balance. But Labour wouldn't be Labour if they weren't constantly trying to take away your minor everyday politically incorrect freedoms. This time around they'll probably tighten laws on public drinking. Or any drinking.
>Sir Keir Starmer has provoked outrage from senior Tories and political grandees for removing a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from inside 10 Downing Street.
>Just eight weeks after he moved into Number 10, it has been claimed by his biographer that he found the £100,000 painting, commissioned by former Labour premier Gordon Brown, "unsettling".
>But his removal of the portrait has been condemned as "vindictive" and "petty" by Tory MPs and prompted calls for the prime minister to return it to its place inside Downing Street.
Meh. Are there really no bigger problems. But £100K seems a bit much for a portrait painting.
>As a starting point, a head and shoulders drawing by a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters start at £1,500 or a family group by a renowned artist could be in the regions of £100,000.
So we could be looking at maybe £20K as a reasonable price for a single-person portrait by an artist whose skill and renown are fit to paint a (former) PM. If people donated £100K, then I guess that's fine, but it still seems like the remaining £80K could have been put to a better use.
>>99907 He should put in a 20 meter statue of Churchill on the day he leaves knocking out part of the bedroom floor to have his head poke through and stare at the bed, and then labour can pretend to be incensed about that's removal.
>>99907 >Just eight weeks
I'd have had it on a bonfire in the Rose Garden my first night in the gaff.
>>99908 What an absolutely dogshit portrait. Still, not a bad way to monetise your artistic abilities, whether it's more or less dignified than doing guro comissions for insane people is another matter.
>>99968 They were called zombie knives, but maybe that’s a brand name or something. Certainly, the law applies to (some) machetes and hunting knives which are not zombie knives. Basically, I think you need to hand in any knife that is
>more than eight inches long (but I don’t know if this is just the blade or the whole thing)
>has holes in it (this is part of the style of “zombie knives”)
>has a serrated edge as well as a regular blade (like most regular hunting knives and machetes, such as mine)
>has more than two points on the blade (again, zombie knives are fancy and not necessarily practical)
>has spikes sticking out of it (I mean, really)
I don’t know how many boxes the knife needs to tick before you can’t have it any more, but I bought mine off a website that keeps getting mentioned on the news, so it’s almost certainly the same type that criminals use.
I have literal kitchen cutlery that could meet that description.
Apparently they made the majority of swords illegal all the way back in 2020 though, and I know a lot of nerds who are probably breaking the law just by owning replicas from Lord of the Rings or what have you and are none the wiser. I wasn't aware there was a big problem with sword crime.
>>99971 The only thing I have that fits this is a machete but it's my gardening machete. Every other knife I own is for work or camping and they don't tick any of these boxes.
The law is hilariously complicated, because the draft kept getting tweaked when they realised that they'd be banning lots of "normal" knives.
The knife must have a blade over 8" long and have a sharp point and have a plain cutting edge, and also have at least one of the following features:
More than one hole in the blade
A serrated section, except a section close to the handle of no more than 2"
Spikes (other than the main point)
More than two sharp points (other than a sharp point on the cutting edge near the handle)
>Apparently they made the majority of swords illegal
That was a farcical bit of legislation. They wanted to ban "samurai swords", so they decided to ban any curved sword. They added in a long list of exceptions for various interest groups - anything hand made, anything of historical interest, anything owned by a Sikh for religious purposes, anything owned for the legitimate purposes of martial arts or historical re-enactment etc etc. The companies who were selling cheap samurai swords to nutters just started making straight samurai swords.
Why on earth did they even need to go after curved swords in particular? Is a nutter with a katana any more especially dangerous than a nutter with a longsword? Both can (or could) be had very cheaply, as I recall from the days when I was an edgelad who liked looking at swords.
Was it just to boost sales of traditional english weapons over dirty weeb ones?
>>99972 The first thing I thought of when I read that was my grandma's fancy carving knife, which is apparently a dangerous illegal weapon now.
Have any of these bans actually stopped anything that posed a significant risk to the public? I can't find it any more but the list of prohibited weapons seems to be full of obscure Asian martial arts weapons which are fun to learn and look cool in demonstrations but wouldn't be particularly practical in an actual fight. Basically the kind of weapons that are only more dangerous to the opponent than to the user in the hands of martial arts and circus nerds, who generally aren't going around doing armed roadman shit.
It's a kind of magical thinking. Cheap Chinese "samurai" swords became reasonably popular among nutters and drug dealers, therefore there must be something uniquely evil about those kinds of swords. The result of cheap swords being designed specifically to get around the legislation was entirely predictable, but that kind of legislation isn't really motivated by logical reasoning - it's more of a secular ritual, a kind of incantation to ward off evil.
We see it all the time when there are "calls for x to be made a specific offence", with the word specific being necessary because x is already illegal. Making something extra double illegal has no practical value, but it seems to reassure people that the powers-that-be are taking the issue Very Seriously Indeed.
It's mostly forgotten now, but there was a huge moral panic about martial arts in the late 80s. The Tory press had somehow convinced themselves that Bruce Lee was going to turn a generation of kids into ruthless assassins. It got so mad that we ended up censoring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
You have to wonder what state we'll be in in another 20 years. They will run out of shit to ban eventually.
When I was a kid we used to take our air rifles, which we bought from a fishing tackle shop absolutely no questions asked despite being obviously mischievous teenagers, down to the woods and shoot cans and bottles for a laugh. That was probably already illegal then, I suppose, but nobody seemed to give a shit. Nowadays I get the impression someone would phone the police and we'd have ended up on the local news.
Also I like how that article starts of sort of trying to absolve and minimise today's "woke" moral panics, when really it only further amplifies how regressive the modern liberal left really is in mirroring the right's most absurd reactionary impulses.
