At least they look silly in their hi-vis jackets.

>The government spends huge amounts of money each year on our behalf. In 2022–23, UK government spending was almost £1,200 billion, or around £17,000 per person. This was equivalent to around 45% of GDP.

https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spend-money

If the government spend £1,200 billion every year why are Labour freaking out about a £22 billion black hole? At that sort of scale isn't it pretty much a rounding error?

>>99925

£22bn works out to about £770 per household. It's a very significant amount of money, even if it seems small relative to the vast overall budget. That gap of £770 per household has to be filled, one way or another.

By comparison, the entire police budget is just over £17bn. Schools and defence are about £55bn each. "Making tough decisions" is a political slogan, but it's also a basic reality of managing an economy. It's very easy to absolutely wreck an economy through lots of small decisions that seem individually inconsequential. The mini-budget that sent the markets into pandemonium and sank Liz Truss included "only" £45bn of unfunded tax cuts.

>>99925

>£17,000 per person

Why is it I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth?

>>99928
Roughly 20% is going on healthcare, 10% on education, 25% on benefits (including the state pension), 5% on defence, 4% on law and order and 4% on transport. I think the other big one is debt interest. I'm also sure we spend about as much subsidising Scotland as we do on defence.

This is before all the bumper public sector pay rises.

Here are some graphs.

... I was going to leave the post at that, but nah. The top one is 2022/23 real terms spending. The middle is spending and GDP. I think it's interesting that our spending is going up ever so slightly more slowly than our GDP. I'm no economist, but I would imagine that does give us some wiggle room.

I assume that "social protection" is all the different bennies lumped together, which to me seems somewhat dishonest, because really there is quite a lot under that umbrella. The bottom is the most recent breakdown I can find (I didn't look very hard) in easy to understand coloured bar format, instead of the confusing TV static nerds call "numbers", from 2017.

I would hazard a guess that the pension budget has gone up significantly compared to the others since then. Possibly by as much as £22bn.

>>99933

Another chart.

Running a developed country is expensive, but running a welfare state with an increasingly old and sick population is really expensive.

Another graph.

>Ministers did not carry out a specific impact assessment on the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment from the bulk of pensioners, such as the potential effect on illness and death rates among older people, Downing Street has said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/12/no-winter-fuel-payments-impact-assessment-was-carried-out-no-10-admits

I imagine if it was the Tories doing this they'd have been called cruel and evil.

>>99960

However many codgers it kills off, it won't be enough. Until the boomers hurry up and die, things can only get worse. I hope Starmer secretly accepts this reality.

>>99962
You'll be old one day. Don't fall for divide and rule.

>>99963

Yes, and by then I'll be living in a country that is poorer than Romania.

The boomers are our rulers, or at least were. They were the dominant electoral coalition that gave us austerity and took the triple lock. They racked up levels of debt that we've never seen in peacetime, debts that we'll still be struggling to repay when I'm long dead. They banged on about "having paid tax all their lives", while glibly ignoring the fact that they have received many times more in pensions and other benefits than they ever paid in tax.

Thanks in part to the passage of time and in part to a certain novel virus, the old are losing their stranglehold on electoral power, but they still control most of the wealth.

Yesterday, Lord Darzi's report revealed the fact that children spend longer on NHS waiting lists than adults. Children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than pensioners. That's the country we have become - a country where sick children wait for treatment in cold houses with bare cupboards, a country where children are literally robbed of their futures by their own grandparents.

Blaming the super-rich is a fantasy, because there just aren't very many super-rich people. There are 55 British citizens with a net worth of over $1bn. Their collective net worth is less than the assets in the University Superannuation Scheme. There are millions of millionaires who don't think of themselves as such - quite ordinary upper-middle-class people who've paid off the mortgage and have a good pension. The greedy capitalists who have asset-stripped Britain don't live in Monaco, they live in the nice houses down the road.

A reckoning is coming, whether we want it or not; a reckoning with the fact that what was done to this country wasn't imposed by a faceless elite of rich people, but by our parents and grandparents. Their pension funds are the majority shareholders in our privatised utilities. They're the prime beneficiaries of the house price bubble, not some shadowy offshore property empire. They're the people who turned up at every local planning meeting to object to anything being built anywhere; they are the anti-growth coalition, because they consistently prioritised the view out of their window over people having places to live and work.

If we want to meaningfully increase public expenditure, we can't just raid the ultra-wealthy, because there are so few of them that it wouldn't touch the sides. We have to start turning the screws on the merely comfortably-off, because collectively they've got most of the wealth. Abolishing the Winter Fuel Payment is - hopefully - just the opening salvo.

There's a whole other rant about the absolute necessity of mass immigration to stop our demographics from collapsing, but I'll save that for another time.

>>99964
>took the triple lock

This is where I stopped reading. If you're bringing up the introduction of a 2.5% underpin to the meagre state pension as a lead example of evil and greed then I know the rest of your post will be a load of half-baked juvenile bollocks, which you're mindlessly parroting because you read it on Twitter.

>>99965

>meagre state pension
>meagre

Lad. Look at the graphs.

>>99966
>The UK devotes a smaller percentage of its GDP to state pensions and pensioner benefits than most other advanced economies.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00290/

>UK pension the lowest of advanced nations, says OECD

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42236328

The state pension is absolute peanuts. Spending increasing on the state pension because there's more old people ≠ the state pension itself is generous.

>>99967

Problem is that it's universal, and pensioners are already, as a demographic, loaded. It's dishonest to claim the universal pension need be more generous because of a minority of pensioners who are poor. The majority of pensioners are getting it on top of a private pension and considerable assets. It's a very small number of people, proportionally, who need targeted help.

>>99964
>If we want to meaningfully increase public expenditure, we can't just raid the ultra-wealthy, because there are so few of them that it wouldn't touch the sides.

This is an absolutely absurd position. If you narrow your criteria for "wealthy" strictly to British billionaires that live inside the UK, then yes, you'll boil down to a list of fifty or so (though those individuals do own in the hundreds of billions combined, it's a digression).

Taxing wealth, though, includes all those people who have a meagre net worth of £650 million, like Rishi Sunak, for example, of which there are far more. There are currently around 2.6 million millionaires in the UK, with a net worth beyond what most of us will ever see in their lifetime.

Taxing wealth would also include all those people that own assets in the UK, but that don't live in the UK. We routinely tax assets that are owned by non-residents, though not nearly enough, and we could easily increase those taxes.

According to the World Inequality Report from 2022, the bottom 50% of the British population owned less than 5% of country's wealth in 2021, which is to say you could raise taxes on half of our population and barely have an effect, because it not touch 95% of the wealth that actually exists in the country. The idea that taxing wealth "wouldn't touch the sides" just isn't true; even worse is the idea that the real money comes from squeezing our "comfortable middle" even harder. That's not even wrong, that's the opposite of the truth.

>>99970

>There are currently around 2.6 million millionaires in the UK

That's my entire point. A wealth tax that would bring in a useful amount of revenue couldn't just target a tiny elite of people who are obviously very rich, but would have to apply to a large number of quite ordinary people who don't look exceptionally wealthy, most of whom are pensioners.

"Tax the rich" as a populist slogan means something like "we could solve all our problems painlessly if this tiny elite just paid their fair share". "Tax the rich" as a practical political and economic strategy means taxing doctors and dentists and accountants, which is vastly more controversial.

>>99967

Yes, now compare how much tax is paid by median earners.

>>99975

>taxing doctors and dentists and accountants, [...] is vastly more controversial.

Is it, though? I think most people are well aware those kinds of jobs are rolling in money and could afford to pay a bit more. If you look at the likes of consultants who can burn both ends working for the NHS as well as doing private on the side, many are earning in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

>>99977

The problem in a nutshell:

>>99978
If I'm ever wrongfooted on national television by the intellectual titan that is Richard Burgeon, please shoot me in the head immediately. Thank you, both.

We give the doctors the pay rise they're after and then we take it off them in tax. There we go, I've fixed the economy.

>>99979
Tbf it was Fiona Bruce who hoisted the noose he'd tied around his own neck. The politician didn't really pick up on it.

>>99975

You were talking about taxing pensioners rather than wealthy people, because there are so few billionaires to tax. It was a confused post, to say the least.

>"Tax the rich" as a populist slogan means something like "we could solve all our problems painlessly if this tiny elite just paid their fair share".

Only if you're being wilfully obtuse about it. There is a "tiny elite", depending on how you choose to define it. If the top 1% of a given population owns nearly a quarter of the wealth of a country, as it does in the UK, that would be about 670,000 people. Whether these numbers qualify as a "tiny elite" seems immaterial; it is a massive disparity that can be (and has been historically been) controlled with taxation. This would solve a great number of problems.

There's also a lot of confusion between wealth and income, since most people's sole source of income is their salary.
I think it's a combination of that confusion and the extreme top-end inequality of wealth ownership that leads to nonsense exchanges like the one you find in >>99978. The audience member is in the top 5% of earners, but he is almost certainly no where near the top 5% of the country's wealthiest.

>"Tax the rich" as a practical political and economic strategy means taxing doctors and dentists and accountants, which is vastly more controversial.

This controversy can be addressed by taxing wealth rather than income. I think most people readily accept that hard and/or highly technical work should be rewarded with a good salary, but there's been a great effort to conflate income with wealth. Beyond a certain threshold, more money is earned simply by owning stuff. The reality is that most professionals, even highly paid ones, do not belong to that highest bracket of the country's wealthiest.

>>99991

>I think most people readily accept that hard and/or highly technical work should be rewarded with a good salary, but there's been a great effort to conflate income with wealth.

It's not a conflation - the vast majority of wealth is just income accumulated over time. Most of that top 1% are just people on high incomes who are approaching retirement age. In practice, taxing wealth means taxing those hard-working professionals twice. That has real, complex and usually unexpected consequences.

The biggest factor behind the reduction in the number of GPs is an obscure tax rule that most people are completely unaware of. There's a lifetime limit on the amount of tax-free pension contributions you can make, which currently stands at £1,073,100. Many doctors will hit that limit well before reaching retirement age, at which point their marginal tax rate suddenly and dramatically increases. Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of those people think "fuck it, I might as well retire".

When people say "tax the wealthy", most people wouldn't imagine that there's any connection between our existing strategy of taxing the wealthy and their inability to get an appointment with their GP, but that's exactly the case. It's also a key driver behind the wider issue of early retirement that happened post-pandemic.

This is what Labour are talking about when they keep talking about "making tough choices". When we talk about "the wealthy" and "highly skilled professionals who deserve to be rewarded for a lifetime of hard work", we're talking about the same people.

https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj.p1450

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8626/CBP-8626.pdf

>>99992
If we said, "Go ahead and retire, and we'll keep taxing you anyway, you big millionaire", they would still be very well-off but we would also have money to train replacement doctors.

>>99992
>It's not a conflation - the vast majority of wealth is just income accumulated over time.

It absolutely is a conflation, because as I mentioned in my post, "income" is commonly understood as "salary". However, in order to break into - and I repeat this fact with emphasis to make sure it's getting through - the top 1% of people that own nearly a quarter of the total wealth of the country, you need to have assets which pay you in such a way that have very little to do with being a GP.

We are talking about people that do things like, owning commercial property that large companies rent out offices in, private property to rent out to families, ownership of land, ownership of shares which pay dividends. This is a world away from being a doctor, dentist, or an accountant.

Acquiring income-generating assets is something that is simply not an option for the overwhelming majority of people, indeed the majority of the public struggle to buy and pay off a single home. Even the professional class you're describing will only be able to get their hands on so many assets even after an entire career of pulling a high salary. It is basically unrelated to a wealth tax, because the majority of wealth is owned by so few.

Your bizarre, sleight-of-hand argument seems to ignore the fact I'm talking about direct taxation based on someone's net worth. You also seem to be under the assumption that tax operates on the raw count of taxpayers, but it's a percentage. A well designed wealth tax would likely not even need to touch a great deal of the population, because half the country owns about 5% of the assets.

>>99992
>There's a lifetime limit on the amount of tax-free pension contributions you can make, which currently stands at £1,073,100. Many doctors will hit that limit well before reaching retirement age, at which point their marginal tax rate suddenly and dramatically increases.

You've conflated two things here. The annual allowance and the lifetime allowance, with the latter not existing anymore.

>>99992
>Most of that top 1% are just people on high incomes who are approaching retirement age.
No, they're not. They're mostly landowners. More than 10% of land in England and Wales remains unregistered, despite registration being compulsory since at least 2003. It remains unregistered because it hasn't been bought, sold, or transferred in that time. A significant amount of that is either owned by institutions or in vehicles such as family trusts, and therefore hasn't been transacted on in decades and won't be for decades more to come.

Notice how in that chart you've posted, the median wealth figure is in many cases less than half the mean. That suggests a very skewed distribution of wealth.

>>99994

Getting into the top 1% requires a personal wealth of about £1.4m, which would be entirely typical for a doctor reaching retirement - a pension pot of about a million quid, plus a house worth about £400k. When we talk about wealth, we're mostly talking about pensions and houses.

Wealth is much less concentrated than it used to be; a hundred years ago, the top 1% had a 60% share of wealth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48759591

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/distribution-household-wealth-uk

>>99997
>which would be entirely typical for a doctor reaching retirement - a pension pot of about a million quid

You don't have a pot of money with the NHS pension. Nobody is claiming a doctor is a millionaire because they have an annual pension of ~£50k a year.

I think there will be an inevitable u-turn once the first pensioners start dying from a cold snap. I don't disagree with scrapping the universal entitlement to the winter fuel allowance but maybe making it more generous, than pension credit only, would be better.

Also the government should scrap the triple lock and use the money saved to set up the National Care Service. I know the money saved won't cover the billions needed but will be something to start with.

>>100016
You just know some petulant cow will freeze to death on purpose just to protest about having to pay to stay alive.

>‘I’m selling 35 of my 65 rental homes – this is only the beginning under Labour’

>For many fed-up landlords, the Renters’ Rights Bill is the final straw David Coughlin has been a landlord for two decades, but now aged 54, he has decided it’s time to drastically downsize his portfolio and switch careers. For him, the decision to downsize has been four years in the making. First it was the introduction of Section 24, which abolished mortgage tax relief, then high interest rates, and now the Renters’ Rights Bill – dubbed the biggest overhaul of rental law in over 30 years.
>Mr Coughlin said: “It’s all making people think it’s a good time to get out of the market. Some of my properties have gone up by £10,000 in value over the past year, and Savills expects rents to rise 20pc over the next five years – it’s still an attractive market. “But very few long-standing portfolio landlords are keen to keep all their private rental properties occupied. This is because it is about to become much more difficult to evict a tenant if you want to sell your property.”
>Under the new bill, tenants will be able to miss three months’ rent before a landlord can take action to possess their property, a change from the current two-month threshold. Section 21, otherwise known as “no-fault” evictions, will also be banned completely by next summer. This means landlords will need to rely on Section 8 for evictions, a piece of legislation beleaguered by court delays which reached 55 weeks on average last year.

>Mr Coughlin has 65 properties himself, and has built a business out of helping other landlords sell or trade their portfolios. He is planning to halve the number of his properties, selling up to 35 of them and only keeping hold of the least leveraged properties with the best tenants and energy performance ratings. Once he has downsized his portfolio, the plan is to turn his skills to property development instead. He said this was because “the Government supports the latter and is strangling the former”. He has seen the number of portfolio landlords coming through his door to sell and exit the market accelerate. In fact, his agency recently had its best week of landlords contacting them to sell in over 12 months. Supply to the rental market has stalled over the past eight years. Meanwhile, rents have continued to climb.

>Property portal Zoopla says rents have risen by 30pc over just the past three years, exacerbated by the lack of new stock coming onto the market. Kate Faulkner, chair of the government advisory body Home Buying & Selling Group, said before the changes to mortgage rate relief in 2016, rents used to rise by 2pc a year. “Then-governments started interfering and rents started to rise faster and stock began to deplete.” Another big worry for landlords is the cost of upgrading their stock. The new legislation will apply the Decent Homes Standard to all private rental homes. It already applies to the social sector. Landlords will need to investigate “hazards”, such as damp and mould, excess cold, and severe pest infestations, within 14 days and fix them within a further seven days. If they do not, they face fines of up to £7,000 from the council.
https://archive.is/ASxy4

How could this be allowed to happen - what will happen if all the landlords decide to sell-up?

>>100018
Labour really should have considered the consequences of their plans to free up housing. All those houses being freed up; it's just not right.

Also, I know you post these ragebait articles a lot, but I would absolutely buy a Telegraph if they published a follow-up article about the skeletons of his starved children being gnawed at by foxes.

>>100018

YOU CAN'T EVEN CHARGE SOMEONE £1200PCM FOR A DAMP RAT-INFESTED HOVEL ANY MORE IN CASE IT OFFENDS A LESBIAN. IT'S POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD.

>>100018
I guess it depends who buys them up. As it stands, 43% of landlords only own one property and make up 20% of the rental market whereas the 18% of landlords who own more than five properties make up 48% of the rental market.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing large commercial landlords. Weren't Lloyds aiming to own 50,000 rental properties by the end of the decade?

>>100019
>All those houses being freed up

It's not actually going to do anything for housing stock, we have a chronic housing shortage. One upside might be that leaseholds rise but the argument on leasehold v renting isn't as compelling as people think.

>>100021
It does seem like a market ripe for consolidation. I imagine there's a lot of room for efficiencies if most of the rental housing in the country was managed by in-house property managers rather than some shady office taking a substantial share of the rent for fuck-all.

McLandlord's might also have the means and incentive to also make more efficient use of housing plots and start tearing down terraced houses for multi-story flats.

>Keir Starmer has declared more free tickets and gifts than other major party leaders in recent times, with his total now topping £100,000 after recent support for his lifestyle from Labour donor Waheed Alli.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/18/keir-starmer-100000-in-tickets-and-gifts-more-than-any-other-recent-party-leader

Am I imagining things, or did Starmer repeatedly make the point that Labour wouldn't indulge in cronyism and favouring supporters/chums like the Tories did?

>>100025
>Starmer has previously insisted his acceptance of hospitality is related to his security requirements of not being able to go into the stands, saying: “If I don’t accept a gift of hospitality, I can’t go to a game. You could say: ‘Well, bad luck.’ That’s why gifts have to be registered. But, you know, never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far.”

"Sorry guys, got to sell out my values so I can go watch my team play. Come you Yids!"

>>100028
Remember, it's not bad when our side does it.

If Corbyn's party gets off the ground and becomes essentially the left wing UKIP (and by estension, Corbyn himself becomes the lefty Savile) we could be looking at some really interesting times in politics over the next few years. Starmer and the crew are apparently attempting a speedrun of reversing the biggest poll lead they've ever had and completely reversing their fortunes, so a split in the lefty vote as large as the split in the rightoid vote would have dramatic impacts.

We might even see a Lib Dem government. And then we'd see just how un-principled and generic a government can truly be.

>>100032
>If Corbyn's party gets off the ground
Since when does he have his own party?

>>100038
He's looking to form a party with the pro-Palestine Muslim independent MPs called Collective. He's muscling in on Galloway territory.

>>100032
>attempting a speedrun of reversing the biggest poll lead they've ever had
I'm not into politics or owt but even I can see such statements have become trite. Seems said after every election regardless of affiliation.

>>100040
The massive fuck up was telling everyone the budget is going to be awful well in advance of the budget. If you don't give people details other than saying its going to get worse before it gets better then they'll fill in the blanks with their imagination.

It's six weeks to the budget and it was the end of August when Starmer said to prepare for hard times and pain. It's unsurprising that we're getting almost daily speculation that he's going to cut the single person council tax discount, that he's going after pensioners free bus passes, that he's raising capital gains tax, that he's going to cut pension tax relief or cap how much tax-free cash you can take at retirement, that he wants to stop you being able to smoke in beer gardens, that they're going to hike fuel duty, etc.

I guess we're going to see AI generated images for every political issue now. I'm almost looking forward to seeing what mental people end up creating with image generators.

>>100043
It's the textbook strategy though, you do all the painful things early into the Parliament and entrench the idea that it's all the fault of the last government. Something Labour is going to have to do if it wants to see 10 years of painful restructuring.

The difference this time is how fast things are moving - but maybe they're just boiling the frog and we don't know it yet.

>>100043
They’ve told us to prepare for the worst so we will be relieved when it’s not actually that bad. It’s all a ploy to manage our expectations. Things will be, maybe not great, but easily survivable.

>>100047
If they're prepared to clamp down on smoking outside pubs who knows what other Draconian nonsense they're dreaming up right now?

>>100043
>he's going to cut the single person council tax discount
This tax discount is the only thing keeping me off of Housing Benefit.

At his current rate of unforced errors, Starmer will attend next year's Defence & Security Equipment International to a backdrop of mass protests, only to shoot himself in the dick with a plasma rifle while attempting to spin it around on his finger like a cowboy.

>>100050
I saw him getting bollocked on the news and doing that exasperated smile when absolutely everyone is out to get you, and it made me wonder: could he at some point become a left-leaning Liz Truss? Will he go down in history as basically just a laughing stock?

>>100052

The trouble with Liz Truss is that she wasn't just a mong, but nobody even voted for her to begin with. Starmer might be making a lot of people mad right now but he has a massive majority, and that means he's pretty much free to do what he wants for the forseeable future at least.

I think it's all going to come down to the budget.Either there's some good news in there or some secret sauce they've been keeping secret, something that will at very least make people say "okay fair play to them they seem to have a plan". If there isn't and it's just more cuts on top of tax hikes, they might be in actual trouble, because at this point even the business ghouls are saying what the country needs is plain and simply investment more than anything else.

>>100054

It doesn't really matter what people think of Labour today, it matters what they think in 2029. Nobody will really remember the 2024 budget by then. It makes perfect political sense to rip the plaster off ASAP.

>Keir Starmer has suffered a precipitous fall in his personal ratings since winning the election, according to a new poll for the Observer that comes before his first Labour conference as prime minister.

>The latest Opinium poll reveals that Starmer’s approval rating has plunged below that of the Tory leader Rishi Sunak, suffering a huge 45-point drop since July. While 24% of voters approve of the job he is doing, 50% disapprove, giving him a net rating of -26%. Sunak’s net rating is one point better.

>In a troubling assessment of the government’s opening months, only 27% think it has so far been a success, while 57% think it has not been successful. Even a third (32%) of those who voted for Labour at the last election believe the government has not been a success in its opening two months. Labour is seen as focusing too much on the government’s fiscal position when the public want them to focus on growing the economy.

>James Crouch, head of policy and public affairs at Opinium said: “While the prime minister might have a world-beating new wardrobe, voters are refusing to wear his government’s austerity drive. Not only do the public feel worse off than they did before the election, but concerns that Labour has focused too much on government finances rather than growth have almost wiped out their lead on the economy. Much of the blame for this tone is being directed at Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, who now have approval ratings on a par with Rishi Sunak.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/21/honeymoon-over-keir-starmer-now-less-popular-than-rishi-sunak

>>100060
That's dreadful. However, I take some issue with trying to declare a government a successs or failure after two-and-a-half months of power, although I'm not as blithely confient that it "doesn't really matter" as >>100055 . The Conservative's constant reinvention (AKA, intercine bloodletting and favourable coverage from the usual suspects) allowed them to repeatedly break with the past in a manner Starmer might find more difficult when he's still PM in 2029. If only by then are he and his government starting to ease up on the politics-as-Pain-Olympics way of doing things, he might be in more trouble than he anticipated. Because, and I'm sure no one here needs reminding, the only reason Starmer has his gigantic majority is because the UK voting system is an archaic nightmare. One that only needs a few percentage points to swing against Labour to make life very difficult in a hypothetical future parliament.

>>100052
I don't think it could go that wrong for Starmer. Unless my prediction of a Soviet-style collapse occurs under his watch, he isn't enough of a reckless ideologue to have a disaster on the scale of Liz Truss's. He might end up being seen as unworthy of respect, feckless and plainly unready for high political office, but in a John Major-y way. Just a chap who was holding the parcel when the music stopped and not much else. Of course, maybe next year Starmer gets his poltical Second El-Alamein and from then on it's hit after hit, but that's reading tea leaves right now.

>>100061
I reckon a lot of it is about managing expectations. Maybe certain people hold Labour to a higher standard than the Tories, but I think many were voting in the hope that things would actually get better for once and instead we're being prepped for a fresh round of austerity. Things would probably be worse under the Tories, but "things are going to get less worse, not better" isn't what people believed they were signing up for.

It also doesn't help that they've announced cuts are coming while he's raking in shitloads of freebies. He's sounding ridiculously out of touch when he's talking about the struggle of having to accept a hospitality box when he goes to watch Arsenal, no doubt funded by those who'll want something in return, because he's no longer able to sit in the stands like a commoner.

Different cheeks of the same arse.

I think the media is definitely giving Labour a rougher time than it did when Cameron and Osbourne came in, but it's as much about party bias as it is about sheer overwhelming dissatisfaction and disillusionment with government in general. There's definitely a bit of double standard at play, but it's not just that.

On the one hand yeah, Kier is about right to get all the nasty stuff out of the way early on when he has a better position to do so, but he has definitely failed to anticipate just how unhappy the public in general are right now. This isn't an ordinary change of government, under these circumstances he needed to be absolutely squeaky clean and make sure there wasn't even a speck of dirt for the media to pick up on. He's failed pretty spectacularly at that.

It's so bizarre hearing Starmer making fun of the Labour Party in 2019. Not only was he a senior figure in the shadow cabinet at the time, many of the the same Labour members who were fighting for that manifesto and attending that conference just did so again for your Labour Party a few weeks ago. Compound that with what the heckler was saying, "does that include the children of Gaza too?", a not totally unfair question given the circumstances, and he struck a very creepy figure in those moments, in my opinion.

>>100082
He also wants to release the sausages, the absolute maniac.

>Sir Keir Starmer will warn of a "shared struggle" ahead but say there is "light at the end of the tunnel" for the country, in his first speech to the Labour Party conference as prime minister.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0e1gjexyxno

>PM suggests £20,000 accommodation donation was for 'son to find somewhere for GCSE revision'

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/keir-starmer-donation-son-gcse-housing-acoommodation-prime-minister-b1183972.html

We're all in this together.

>>100086
I don't think I buy this story. His son needed a place to study during the election campaign and Starmer accepted someone offering space for this. £20k is the supposed rental value. It's a little suspect but I'm not sure what the right way to handle it would be.

The same with the box seat to watch Arsenal play. He couldn't use his season ticket for security concerns so he accepted Arsenal upgrading him to a private box.

>Keir Starmer was given a further £16,000 worth of clothes by the Labour peer Waheed Alli, which was declared as money for his private office, the Guardian can reveal.

>The donations, comprising £10,000 in October 2023 and £6,000 in February 2024, bring the total amount in gifted clothes to £32,000. These latest gifts were not previously known about as they were described as being “for the private office of the leader of the opposition”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/27/peer-gave-keir-starmer-more-clothes-worth-16000-declared-as-money-for-private-office

>>100102
If Starmer's wardrobe is worth £32,000 he should be going way more jazzy and ostentatious. I expect three-piece velvet Savile Row suits at the very, very least.

>>100103
It must tear him up inside to know he could introduce a new round of austerity while dressed like this, but his spads won't let him.

Her what resigned is one of them TERFs so it's fine we don't need her.

Annoyingly it's still the TE part people consider a problem rather than the RF. But on the whole at least, fuck her.

>>100126
It is quite funny that Keir bent over backwards to accommodate her on her one big issue only for her to throw a hand grenade at him the first chance she got. Et tu, evangelist christian korean youtuber?

>>100126>>100127
She kind of has a point on this though.

>>100128
She does, but historically she's been fractionally allied with the parts of the Labour party that has wanted to freeze pensioners and slash benefits since at least 2014. If you believe she's really resigning for her stated (good) reasons then you're a very trusting individual indeed.

>Labour used “economically illiterate” analysis paid for by water companies in order to argue against the nationalisation of the sector in England, the Guardian can reveal.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/29/labour-water-industry-analysis-argue-against-nationalisation

>>100126
Whose 'we'?

Would

>>100138
>The letter, sent by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
>Matthew Topham, the lead campaigner at We Own It, said: “Keir Starmer’s government is at a crossroads: it can protect households and our waterways or it can protect shareholders. Treasury officials have rather made it clear that it is the continued privatisation at Thames Water which poses a risk to the finances of other water companies and could spark a Liz Truss-style borrowing crisis.”

Why are reporters administratively illiterate? The letter would've been drafted by some bod on 30k and cleared by someone on 50k - NOT the Labour Party which, I am told, isn't the Civil Service. It's likely never even getting a glance by an economist or the Minister and will be (if you're cynical) recycling lines from the last government barring a proper steer otherwise.

I'm not questioning that Labour Ministers won't make a massive spending commitment during a Spending Review and will reflexively try to plug a hole using investors. You won't see any commitment until next spring unless the Chancellor is willing to put her neck out - and even then she likely would announce it at the end of the month. But this just picks at low-hanging fruit for a 'gotcha' headline. Also I dislike when campaigners cherry pick.

Complain box ticked

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4301n3771o
>Nearly £22bn pledged for carbon capture projects
I regret to inform you that while there is no money left for anything but investment, the investment money has been allocated towards increasing our national stock of magic beans.

Am I supposed to care or have an opinion on this Sue Gray thingy?

>>100141

I don't know exactly why nor care that much, but the press have clearly been gunning for her ever since she did that report about the covid parties. I suspect she has tread on the wrong establishment toes at some point down the line and thus she became another line of attack. It was quite short sighted of Kier to give her the job because it was obvious that's what would happen, really.

I take all that to mean she's probably very good at her job. Too good. But it's still far too boring to give a fuck about.

>>100140

Carbon capture boils my piss. There are a few cases where it could be used in a difficult industry to decarbonise sure but the money is better spent most of the time in carbon-free energy projects.

>>100143
This. Outside of a few very specific industrial applications, which only really make sense if said industry is located right next to the thing that's emitting carbon dioxide, carbon capture and storage is a meme. Even moreso than tidal energy.

Obligatory reminder: Do not take seriously any tidal project that doesn't at least hint at solving the "turbines giving up after about five minutes at sea" problem.

>>100142
I thought the press were fairly soft on her until recently, but in fairness I start from the position that if you write a report like that you should recuse yourself from moving into a party-political role to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, and the press letting you and your party get away with that as something of a failure. I'd attribute her recent fall to Labour's own internal politicking: A bunch of career climbers didn't cling on through the Corbyn years just to be told that they can't have the top job because it's going to a former civil servant who hasn't submitted a hostile briefing against you-know-who in her life. Well, with him out of the way and with infighting as your only skill, you've got to brief against someone - why not her? That still gets the press going for her, but out of laziness rather than bad blood.

I know people keep saying it's a genius move to do all the unpopular stuff while the next election is five years away but, realistically speaking, are they going to turn this around or will the disapproval continue?

>>100146

I like to think it's all Wes Streeting playing the pieces off against each other, waiting for the right moment to stick the knife in and take the Iron Throne for himself.

Well, maybe not him personally but I can definitely see it being a problem for this government in general. Like otherlad says, they're a bunch of backstabbing careerists who got where they are by throwing the previous leadership under the bus. It won't be at all surprising if they can't make it five years without tearing each other apart from within- You can see why Kier has to take such a strong approach to discipline, he knows full well he can't trust a single one of the slimy fucks underneath him.

Anyway the worst thing about those charts is that it demonstrates Theresa May was the best PM we've had in the last decade.

>>100147
Was she actually a bad PM? Everything from Brexit onwards is a little bit of a blur.

All I really remember is that she was constantly undermined on Brexit, tried to bring in social care reform and that she was a bit awkward. I find the last point a little endearing.

>>100148
She was Home Secretary before she was Prime Minister, and Home Secretary is a job which pretty much just consists of embracing every single hard-right reactionary talking point, so I never liked her. But she did mellow out as PM. I remember the death tax or whatever they wound up calling it, which I massively supported, but it lost her a lot of votes. She was also asked what sort of Brexit she supported and she said “a red, white and blue Brexit is the best Brexit for Britain” or whatever, which was an insult to the intelligence of anyone who isn’t such a colossal mong that they’d oppose selling houses to pay for social care.

Austerity bad!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/08/reeves-to-press-ahead-with-capital-spending-plans-despite-rising-debt-costs

Borrowing billions bad!

If the Tories weren't about to elect a clown as their leader I imagine this could get much worse.

>>100161

That'd still put Labour on a majority of 110. The Tories are getting shagged up the arse by FPTP - if they move to the right to take votes from Reform, they lose votes to the Lib Dems and vice versa. It isn't clear how they can dig their way out of that hole, even if Labour implode.

>>100162
>The Tories are getting shagged up the arse by FPTP
That's a shame.

>>100161

That's almost entirely the over 60s suddenly face heel turning, I am sure. Who'd have thought the olds would get so outraged when Labour finally got tough on benefits?

>No not like that!

Fucking pricks.

>>100164
The sooner they get rid of that silly third limb of the triple lock that effectively guarantees that the richest generation just get richer, the better. I get making sure it keeps up with inflation, so that its value isn't eroded. I get making sure it keeps up with wages, so that the olds aren't excluded from the prosperity of wider society, even if the basis for that is questionable. But the 2.5% is just a straight-up transfer.

Here's an idea for you. Tie the state pension to in-work benefits such as the UC Standard Allowance. If you're going to increase the pension, you'll also have to give more money to younger people who aren't working. If you want to argue that the scroungers are getting too much, well then you're going to have to cut the pension. Nobody gets what they want unless both sides get what they want.

>>100164
>That's almost entirely the over 60s suddenly face heel turning, I am sure.

Looking at their data and comparing it with July:

- The number of 35 to 44 year olds saying they'd vote Labour has fallen from 43% to 30%.
- The number of those 65+ saying they'd vote Labour has fallen from 33% to 22%.

It's been falls across the board, you can't blame all your woes on pensioners.

Labour’s poll lead ends after 934 days

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-poll-lead-ends-after-934-days/

>>100167

Remember that bit about the Tories getting bummed by FPTP?

Cuts for pensioners but free weight loss injections for unemployed fatties!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd54zd0ezjo

>>100171

Well It's not quite as ambitious as my plan to put fatties to work on giant treadmills so they generate power while they lose weight, but I suppose it's a start.

>>100171
We got some serious fucking problems in this country yet all people want to do is ridicule any ideas to address them. Shame.

>>100173
Let's wait and see the outcome of the trial, but surely giving fat doleys Ozempic is going to do fuck all to address the factors which lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. It's a sticking plaster to treat a symptom, not the cause.

>>100175
Obesity is tremendously self-perpetuating. Once you're 25 stone it can feel preposterous to imagine anything else for yourself. As you rightly say, let's wait and find out, but calling it a "sticking plaster" isn't really doing that.