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.

>>100176
>calling it a "sticking plaster" isn't really doing that.

If someone has trauma they need therapy. Giving them medication doesn't address the underlying issues. This is no different.

>>100177

A big part of the obstacle to weight loss is mental. If somebody has a big of medicine that gives them a head start and makes them feel a bit better about themselves, I would say it stands to reason they are more likely to succeed in continuing to lose weight and keep it off.

Let's not spiral off on that tangent again but I sense a lot of the same unspoken puritanism that makes people so irrational about vapes and smoking. If it gets people started, if it reduces the burden on the health service, and it is born out by evidence that it has a positive impact, it shouldn't be dismissed.

>>100178

Ozempic works. Everyone who is overweight or obese and starts taking Ozempic loses a lot of weight quickly. Practically everyone who takes it gets much healthier in all sorts of ways - so much so that there's a serious debate about whether it might make sense for everyone to take a GLP-1 agonist like Ozempic, even people who aren't overweight. It's a properly revolutionary class of drugs.

If the problem is that a lot of people are too fat to work and/or so fat that they're getting seriously ill, then the widespread prescribing of Ozempic is an absolute no-brainer. I have a feeling that a lot of people don't actually care about the health of the country, but just like having an underclass that they can sneer at.

>>100177
I've heard so many sodding people say this as if being obese was not primarily a physical problem. Yeah, not knowing when to knock the biccies on the head and only eating fried food can have a psychological component, but being so fat it's dibilitating, or even just quite portly, is not always some kind of freudian cry for help or the malformed expression of past trauma. My granddad's heart didn't explode because granddma' left him back in the 1970s, it was because since then he'd eaten nothing but fry-ups and curries.

Is the opinion that obesity is really a psychological condition some kind of massive overcorrection since everyone now knows it's okay to be mentally ill? The vox pops on the news were saying it as well.

>>100180

At the most basic level, yes, it's about calories in versus calories out, but that's a bit like trying to solve an engineering problem with only physics formulas in your head. Essential, but not enough by itself.

It might seem wanky to talk about "food environments" but it really does matter in terms of human health. Utlimately, we're pragmatic creatures making choices within a certain set of limitations. I'm a health nut by most standards, but I'll eat a bacon sandwich if that's all that's available within a certain time or level of effort. The same goes for multiple criteria; we may be willing to trade off nutritional value for the sake of familiarity, enjoyment, satiety, whatever else.

This matters not just for practical reasons, but psychological ones, as well. You're right that not all overweight or obese people consume too much due to trauma, but there's a sliding scale of will that can be compromised by our mental state. If you've ever eaten a nutritionally poor, or even just a "good enough" meal after a stressful day, then you'll understand what I mean.

If your life is generally stressful, or you have been affected by trauma, imagine yourself in the kind of food environment that allows for easy, quick, dense calories. What may have once been expressed as alcoholism, drug use or other bad habits can also come out as overeating. Adverse childhood events (often abbreviated to ACEs) have been shown to be well-correlated with obesity in children. I would probably say this is just a new behaviourial expression of the same traumas that kids have always unfortunately experienced, but calories in versus calories out doesn't help those for whom food is one of the very few comforts of life: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8192341/

>>100180

At the most basic level, yes, it's about calories in versus calories out, but that's a bit like trying to solve an engineering problem with only physics formulas in your head. Essential, but not enough by itself.

It might seem wanky to talk about "food environments" but it really does matter in terms of human health. Utlimately, we're pragmatic creatures making choices within a certain set of limitations. I'm a health nut by most standards, but I'll eat a bacon sandwich if that's all that's available within a certain time or level of effort. The same goes for multiple criteria; we may be willing to trade off nutritional value for the sake of familiarity, enjoyment, satiety, whatever else.

This matters not just for practical reasons, but psychological ones, as well. You're right that not all overweight or obese people consume too much due to trauma, but there's a sliding scale of will that can be compromised by our mental state. If you've ever eaten a nutritionally poor, or even just a "good enough" meal after a stressful day, then you'll understand what I mean.

If your life is generally stressful, or you have been affected by trauma, imagine yourself in the kind of food environment that allows for easy, quick, dense calories. What may have once been expressed as alcoholism, drug use or other bad habits can also come out as overeating. Adverse childhood events (often abbreviated to ACEs) have been shown to be well-correlated with obesity in children. I would probably say this is just a new behaviourial expression of the same traumas that kids have always unfortunately experienced, but calories in versus calories out doesn't help those for whom food is one of the very few comforts of life: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8192341/

We'll be seeing a lot more train and car induced suicides in the near future.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98y09n8201o

>>100183
If they were any good at getting people jobs I might think this was a good idea.

>>100183

That very much depends on whether it's support or "support". We don't really talk about the fact that the JobCentre have basically given up on actually helping people to get jobs. Claimants are generally either ignored or hounded, but rarely asked "what can we do to help you get into work?".

>>100183

Bit excessive. You can still do that if and when they're well enough again.

We're obviously not talking about patients with a bit of depression, but according to the article, people with serious mental illnesses. They're not in a place in their lives where getting a job should be a top priority.

One of my English teachers in school was in and out of mental health treatment for years, with leaves of absence that would sometimes last almost the whole year. She was schizophrenic and was on strong medication every day to keep her from hearing voices. She eventually retired when she was about in her late 40s because she was too mentally ill. I guess my point is, from a certain level of mental illness, you're not going to be a productive member of the workforce for a significant length of time in one go, and getting a job isn't going to improve your mental health, and could even worsen it. So why not leave people like that alone. Yes, they cost all of us money. But just think if that was you.

>>100183
I went through an employment coaching program once. I cried in an open office and asked to go out onto the balcony for fresh air - they refused because they apparently thought I would jump. We went out onto the street in the end and continued the meeting there, but they advised me to claim a higher grade of ESA and DLA.

I the proceeding 15 years, the thought of having to go through that again is troubling but I'm not sure if it's simple fear of change or genuine concern and lesser ability to maintain my mental health under working pressures. I hesitate to say I could probably do some self employed manual labor while living in comfortably poor - selling a rabbit hutch here and there - but I'd need council tax support at minimum.

My lapsed housing benefit experiment is going okay by the way; down some savings but it looks like I could go a few years before needing to reclaim.

>>100185

Because they know there's fuck all they can do, really. It's been like this for so long now we've just come to accept it, but at the end of the day, the job market is tilted so heavily in favour of the employer that the natural result is vast swathes of people who are all but unemployable. Employers can afford to be picky, they can hire people who should be doing better jobs for minimum wage entry level roles. So the people who are just barely qualified and capable of doing minimum wage entry level roles in the first place don't even get a look in.

On a fundamental level, there are more people looking for jobs, than there are jobs going in the economy. Every vacancy will get dozens of applications, and against such competition, people who don't have much experience and have been long term unemployed for whatever reason, simply don't stand a chance unless they get a lucky break. The government knows this but acts as if it can just push those people harder and they will magically become employable, as if employers will just give people jobs out of the goodness of their heart and all those people are doing wrong is they're not sending enough applications out. It's absurd.

No amount of "support" will fix it, whether it's real or not. I don't know what would.

>>100188

That might be true in some parts of the country, but it's certainly not reflective of the national picture.

I live in a depressed part of the north west with persistently high rates of unemployment and poverty. There are also constant vacancies for a lot of unskilled work. If you're willing to work in a care home or a warehouse or a factory, you can get a job starting tomorrow, even if you've got no qualifications.

They aren't good jobs obviously, but they're jobs, they're available to basically anyone and they generally pay a little bit above minimum wage. It's fair enough if someone is physically or mentally unable to cope with that kind of working environment, but that's a very different problem to a complete lack of available work. I absolutely don't want to tar everyone with this brush, but I know that some people just think "I'd rather sign on than do that - not a totally unreasonable position, but a very different problem to there not being enough jobs.

Speaking from experience, there's a third category of long-term claimants who the government can really do a lot to help at fairly low cost - people who are, for entirely understandable reasons, too discouraged or scared to even try.

A lot of people are absolutely miserable on the dole and feel stuck, but they're not confident that they could stick at a job and they're terrified of losing their benefits. If they try it and it doesn't work out, then they're not even back to square one - Universal Credit is paid in arrears, so they'll go into debt while they're waiting five weeks for their first payment. If someone has been through the work capability assessment process and been assigned as having Limited Capacity for Work, they're rightly worried that if they try a job, it'll be held against them as proof that they are actually capable of work. I've spoken to people who are just too skint to pay for bus fare to work until they get their first pay packet - you used to be able to claim a small grant if you started a new job to cover things like travel and clothes, but the Tories cut it.

Under the last government, the benefits system became totally adversarial - all stick and no carrot. Perhaps it was ideology, perhaps it was just a lack of resource, but the idea of helping people get back into work just went out of the window. The default attitude was that everyone on benefits was just a scrounger who needed to be menaced or punished until they bucked their ideas up. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of that knows that it's completely counter-productive - you're just not equipped to take chances on things if you're living in constant fear of destitution.

Get rid of the waiting period on new UC claims, or at least allow people to pause their claim for a few months while they try a job - if it doesn't work out, you can sign back on like nothing happened. Give jobseekers a bus pass like pensioners get. Start a subsidised scheme so that people can rent a bicycle or moped. Let people claim housing benefit and council tax benefit at the full rate for their first month or two of employment, so they aren't worried about becoming homeless if things go tits up. Give people a small grant to buy a suit for an interview or a set of PPE. Make it clear that the JobCentre actually want you to find a job and take away the fear that they're constantly trying to trip you up and land you with a sanction.

>>100189

It is true, though. The numbers are roughly ~2 million unemployed people, and an estimated ~450,000 vacancies for jobs currently. There's a surprisingly large number of economically inactive people who don't have a job, but aren't considered unemployed, too, but that's another argument if you want to look into how they actually measure these numbers.

Those unskilled jobs you are talking about are always available because they have a high turnover, people will do them for as long as they can stomach it, but they will invariably jump ship at the first chance they get to do something less demanding. Which works fine for the employers because there's always somebody else to take the place of the workers who leave. That's why they never have to increase the wages or improve the conditions, they can more or less treat those workers as expendable because they can recruit another at a moment's notice. This is a feature, not a bug, that's what the term systemic unemployment means. It's also the material basis why people are not incorrect to point out that immigration negatively impacts wages.

It's a complex issue but the broader overall picture, when you zoom out, is that supply and demand push/pull is squarely weighted tin favour of the employer. The bargaining power of the prospective labourer, who needs to work in order to be able to put the heating on this winter without sinking even deeper into debt, is much lower than that of the employer, who is free to set more or less whatever terms they wish because they know people will have to take it.

That's not to say there aren't exceptions. On the opposite side of that you do have workers like the train drivers, who must be commended for the fact they have run their unions like a medieval guild and fiercely guard entry into the profession. They are in many respects artificially restricting the supply of labour so that they have the bargaining power to demand better pay and conditions. If you ask me, turnabout is fair play, that's just doing the same thing in reverse as what business owners are doing when they support policies that increase the labour pool and weaken the bargaining power of workers.

But TL;DR all of this is, to me, why the "free market" just isn't the optimal solution. It never has been and never will be. Torylad can come in and start bleating on about how it's better than having queues for food in East Germany or whatever other strawman whataboutism bollocks he wants to, but our economy could be doing so much better if the government took a more proactive approach, with a long term strategy, instead of leaving it up to the market and hoping these multinationals will just pour enough investment in for things to work themselves out.

>>100189
>>100190

I should add on to this to be clear- Under the Tories, at least, it absolutely was ideologically driven. It was ideologically driven to the point of shooting themselves, and the country, in the foot.

Making benefits more punitive is just one more thing that further weakens to bargaining power of a prospective employee- The reason they made is all stick and no carrot, and constantly pushed the narrative of welfare queens turning down jobs so they can stay on the dole, is a cover for their true objective. Suppress wages. They didn't want the Job Centre to support you to get a job, they wanted you to be desperate and willing to do anything.

This is one of the reasons why anyone regardless if you are a bleeding heart lefty liberal or a conservative yourself should despise what they did to this country over their term. They wanted to make this country into a sweatshop, essentially. A low wage economy that's cheap to do business in. Which, in turn, means you're going to get less back on your tax returns, because income tax is the most effective way to tax a business if you think about it. Corporation tax is full of so many loopholes it's impossible to get them to pay their share, but nobody's dodging income tax, are they.

So when we look at the state of the country's finances, and we ask who's to blame, that's a huge part of it.

I'd just like to repost my opinion about how to massively improve the job market overnight: ban recruitment companies. All jobs, everywhere in the country, need to be registered with the Job Centre, and everyone should be able to browse every single job. No more "you can't see details of any jobs until you give us your CV and let us sell you to prospective employers", no more jobs that are only advertised on LinkedIn, no more recruiting internally without advertising the job anywhere. You don't have to hire the people who will come applying if you still want your corrupt boys's club, but you do have to let them know about the jobs. There's bound to be something out there for most people.

>>100189
These are also brilliant ideas. And if I can be really utopian, I would like to make companies pay to train employees to do a job, if they can't fill a job within 12 months, say. The news regularly has companies complaining that they can't hire anyone to programme their AI, but if you say, "I will do it if you teach me how", they don't want to know. They insist on getting someone who knows already, with absolutely zero outlay of their own. It makes me so angry.

>>100192
This, also compensation must be advertised. If you're going to grossly underpay people, you should be made to publicly wear that as a badge of shame.

>>100192

They tried to do that with the apprenticeship levy. The money is there for employers to take on workers at a heavy subsidy, and it's use it or lose it so in theory the incentive is there too- But companies still don't care, and when they do care, they do it just for cheap labour where they hire somebody on for the fixed term and then boot them after the apprenticeship. Often they'll train people up via apprenticeship, and make it sound really promising through the adverts, to do a job that they'll realise six months down the line, they hire people with no skills or experience to do anyway, and no prospects of advancement.

In theory though I absolutely agree, as somebody who didn't go to uni this has been a massive chip on my shoulder my entire working life. I am capable of doing plenty of things, I have had experience in a pretty surprising variety of fields because I had a four year head start at actually working compared to people who went to uni, but employers simply aren't willing to teach people to do jobs. They want an employee to just come along and be able to just do it 100% from day one.

I don't quite agree with agencies- Yes they're parasites in the same way as estate agents, middlemen who exist for no good reason in theory, but over the course of my many jobs I've found them incredibly helpful. It takes a lot of the tedium out of job searching to just chuck your CV over to some Gemma From HR type and let her do the legwork for you. I think that's one of the tricks a lot of struggling unemployed people haven't figured out- But then, they probably don't have a very good CV for Gemma to work with I suppose.

>Changes to disability benefit assessments are set to come into force soon as Rachel Reeves reportedly pushes ahead with plans to shave £3 billion from the welfare bill ahead of Labour’s upcoming Budget.

>The previous Conservative government announced in 2023 that the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) would be reformed, with the qualifying criteria being significantly overhauled. According to research from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), the changes will mean around 450,000 fewer people will be considered to have limited capability for work.

>Labour recommitted to the plans in its election manifesto, saying the WCA is “not working” and needs to be “reformed or replaced”. Previous estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility show the measure would save £3 billion over the next four years, figures understood to already be factored into Treasury spending assumptions. It is not yet clear if the new government’s plans for WCA will take a different form, with the DWP saying they still plan to release more details.

>However, the government should not make these changes “in haste”, warned experts from living standards think-tank the Resolution Foundation in its ‘Cutbacks Ahead’ report. They said the reform will mean around 450,000 people whose health prevents them from working will see a benefit cut of up to £4,900 a year.

>Its research shows only around 3 per cent of those affected (around 15,400 people) would move into work, with the rest still unable to work while also nearly £5,000 worse off. It is forecast the measure will raise about £1.3bn a year for the Treasury by 2028/29.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/dwp-wca-assessment-changes-pip-disability-latest-b2631496.html

Red Tories.

>>100195

The most frustrating thing about all this is, even if you don't take issue with the ethical aspect of the fucking Victorian poorhouse approach to hounding these people into work, that it's really illogical from a savings point of view. It's making tiny savings from a pool of money that's already a tiny fraction of the budget.

It's like when people go on a diet and instead of cutting out the Snickers and two bags of crisps after lunch every day, they decide they'll cut back from putting two sugars in their cuppa to just one.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98y09n8201o

>Job coaches could visit mental health patients when they are in hospital to help them get back to work, the government has said.

>Trials of employment advisers giving CV and interview advice in hospitals produced "dramatic results", Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC.

Imagine ending up in psychiatric care and they send a dozy twat from the local job centre to force you to work on your CV.

>>100197
Scroll up.

>>100197

>The figure has fallen marginally from the May to July period, but it remains at close to a decade-high after rising during the pandemic. "There is clear evidence we are really struggling with health problems," Kendall added.

And why is that? Why are we struggling so much? Instead of dancing aroun the issue can we get somebody to actually address the elephant in the room just once? The fact that most modern jobs are enough to drive anyone mental, and doing them week in week out for the kind of shit pay we do them for is depressing in and of itself? How so many parts of the country are the kind of bleak post industrial wasteland where Threads is starting to feel like a hopeful vision of the future?

I really think you might get more people back into work if you address that.

>She also urged employers to “think differently” about workers with mental health conditions to offer flexibility to support and retain workers with health problems.

Oh I'm sure that'll tell 'em yeah. Modern workplaces treat mental health the exact same way as health and safety. Just like how they give you a high vis jacket so you can't sue them when you get injured on the job, they give you your six weeks of free CBT with some unqualified knobhead over Zoom, because they have to do that to cover their own arse when they sack you for having too much time off.

Why the fuck would they do anything to support and sustain mentals when they can just employ somebody healthy, because we have a huge surplus of unemployed people for them to chose from?

>Kendall also told the BBC job centres would be transformed by merging them with the national careers service and using AI.

Ha ha ha ha ha fuck sake.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-crackdown-on-single-use-vapes

TL;DR Single use vapes banned from 1st June next year.

I'm one of the vape evangelists and even I can get behind this one. Disposables are a huge fucking waste. First sensible thing this government's done.

>Landlords and shareholders face being hit with tax rises at next week’s budget after Sir Keir Starmer suggested they are not “working people”.

>The Prime Minister said those who earn extra income from property and investments are not covered by Labour’s manifesto pledge to protect “working people” from paying more.

>His remarks come amid widespread expectation that Ms Reeves will use the Budget to increase capital gains tax on profits from the sale of shares. Landlords will face record stamp duty bills next year if the Chancellor goes ahead with unwinding property tax breaks introduced by the Tories.

>Cabinet ministers have also suggested that anyone who earns more than £100,000 a year is not considered a working person, and so is not covered by the guarantee.

https://www.I need to find an archive link for this.co.uk/politics/2024/10/24/landlords-and-shareholders-face-tax-hikes-starmer-working/

>>100257

>Cabinet ministers have also suggested that anyone who earns more than £100,000 a year is not considered a working person

How the fuck do they think somebody earns £100K. 90 percent of the time anyway.

>>100258
The standard salary of an MP is £91,346. They've got a habit of thinking that whatever they're on should be just below whatever tax rises are being implemented.

You can almost guarantee the 60% tax trap will vanish if MP salaries reach £100k in two or three years.

>>100257
>Landlords will face record stamp duty bills next year if the Chancellor goes ahead with unwinding property tax breaks introduced by the Tories.

Looking forward to seeing this cost passed on to renters.

>He would not say what level of savings Sir Keir considered to be small, only that it was more than would be required by families to get out of “difficulty”.

I thought I was fine but that's a pretty fucking low-bar isn't it? Realistically what is 'get out of difficulty' money - I'd say 10k for something like fixing a roof but that's being generous.

>>100258
My assumption is that's total household i.e. a lot of families with two working parents are about to get shafted on childcare.

>>100260
>I thought I was fine but that's a pretty fucking low-bar isn't it?

It's not like they don't have form for this. A single pensioner should lose the winter fuel allowance if their income goes £1 above £11,343.80.

They call him two tear keir because he makes you shed exactly two tears for the poor souls making just £100,000 a year in a country with an average household income of £34,500.

If median earnings is 35k, two average earners are on 70k combined. Anyone on 100k is considerably above the average, so I don't know why you lot are squawking about this like it's penny pinching from hard up paupers.

They're not the upper crust by any means but you have to understand the distribution. "Tax high earners more" is all well and good but if you're only talking about the very top that's a vanishingly small number of people compared to the people who are merely earning a good bit above the average. We absolutely should tax them more but even then it won't bring as much as you'd like. If you want to actually rake in significant tax, then soz Mr Upper Middle Class, it's you who's going to have to pay your share.

You have already reaped the rewards of this country's fine educational establishments and infrastructure in order to ascend to the heady heights of Waitrose shopper, and you're more than willing to pay a tenner for some fairtrade organic renewable keenwah, but when the country needs you to chip in you plead poverty.

Realtalk though, we need to tax assets more, not earnings.

>>100263
I think you're missing the point. The issue isn't that Labour are potentially taxing people who earn over £100k more, it's pledging they aren't going to raise taxes on working people and then coming out with some nonsense about how those earning that much don't count as working people.

There's no need for this disingenuous nonsense. I thought they were making a big deal about the grown ups now being in charge, but they're behaving just as duplicitous as the Tories.

>>100259

I'm not saying don't tax people more who earn more. Very generally speaking. But what this insinuates is that if you earn more than £100K a year, it was by dodgy means, in any case not with honest work.

The gross median income in the UK is now around £30K. Fine, so £100K affords you a much nicer lifestyle than £30K. That's a given. But £100K isn't rich. You'll live many times more comfortably than the average income earner, but you're not the kind of rich where higher taxes don't mean anything to you. Give or take, you'll have £5,500 take-home. Again, you're doing pretty well for yourself at that point. But if you've got a mortgage, wife, and small kids, then it's not like you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with.

What Labour are doing here is not fiscal responsibility, it's good old lefty class struggle. You get punished for having it better, and eight times out of ten, unless you're born into money, the Aristocracy or whatever other kind of generational wealth, it is the result of your own hard work.

>>100258
Ownership, mostly.

As of 2002, £100K household income would put you firmly in the top decile, and £100k individual income would put you in the top 3% of taxpayers, which realistically puts you in the top 2% of the overall population. The sort of people who complain are the sort of people who post the meme about the guy in the bar buying all the drinks unironically.

>>100265
>But what this insinuates is that if you earn more than £100K a year, it was by dodgy means, in any case not with honest work.
In fairness, if you're a policitian, the people you come into contact with on those earnings are lobbyists and SpAds, where "not with honest work" would be a fairly accurate summary.

>>100264

>some nonsense about how those earning that much don't count as working people.

Yeah well what do people earning over 100k do, eh? Sit and push bloody buttons on their computers all day innit. Never done day's proper work in their lives. Quid error demonstration, matey.

Based Khmer Starmer putting all the glasses wearers in work camps.

What if I earn under 100k but don't do much work at all? The nation holds its breath for an answer.

>>100262
>>100263
Why are you pretending we don't live in a low-wage economy? Yes, the average wage in this country is shit. It shouldn't be the big meaty bar we use to shaft the other crabs.

We had a similar outbreak in my trade union recently where people complained about losing access to a workplace canteen with 'comrades' trying to act up because these people would have to bring a lunch in like they do.

>>100269

It's not "shafting the other crabs", the money has to come from somewhere, and that's where the largest share of taxable income is. You are just imagining there's an equivalent sum of money to be taxed off of somebody even better off than you.

I am reminded of a quote, but I can't remember who it's by, probably HH Asquith or some old timey cunt like that, about how when the country needs money to spend it passes the hat around, and all the hard worn northerners who know the value of money very well put in their coppers, but when it reaches the well off bakers and city folk of London there's an uproar.

I mean just look how deluded this cunt is.

>>100265

>What Labour are doing here is not fiscal responsibility, it's good old lefty class struggle.

I can't honestly tell if this is serious. You could be editor of the Mail with hyperbole like this.

>>100270
No, I'm imagining a workable tax system that allows for growth while generating its revenue from growth. '100k a year' and 'savings above a rainy day fund' are not the beginnings of a tax policy.

>bakers

In fairness they do need the dough.

>>100270

>I can't honestly tell if this is serious. You could be editor of the Mail with hyperbole like this.

You don't have to work for the DM to be a bigot.

At first I was like...

>Labour’s Rachel Reeves attacked the proposal of an increase in National Insurance today by describing it to opposite number Rishi Sunak as a “manifesto-breaking, economically damaging and unfair tax on jobs”.

>Before the Prime Minister’s statement, Reeves made clear Labour’s opposition to the policy, saying: “The Prime Minister and the Chancellor’s plans to increase National Insurance will hit workers and business hard – at the worst possible time. The British Chamber of Commerce describe it as a ‘drag anchor on jobs growth’. The Federation of Small Businesses state that if this hike happens, fewer jobs will be created.”

https://labourlist.org/2021/09/rachel-reeves-attacks-national-insurance-hike-as-unfair-tax-on-jobs/

But then I...

>Employers' National Insurance hike to raise £20bn

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wrkngvyx4o

>>100273
It's good to see that in power Labour are capable of changing for the better. Honestly if the Chamber of Commerce and the Federation of Small Businesses recommend against anything besides self-immolation and boofing mysterious white powders, do the opposite.

>>100274
How is increasing employer's national insurance a good thing?

>>100275
Well, I just explained that. If I had to go further I'd say raising £20 billion in public money while not effecting people's take home pay is a win-win.

>>100276
If it costs companies more to employ people then they'll be less likely to increase salaries or recruit more people.

>>100276
You might want to look at how expensive employing people is already. The rule of thumb is the 75-100% rule on top of their wage which is already punishing in a country with low productivity.

But also it's a nonsense tax. There's little reason to have a second stealth income tax with different rates that increases the administrative burden on industry and confuses thick people, especially when it has a regressive cap and has just become a fund to be raided by the government with associated bennies paid via taxation and borrowing. I say little reason because it works as a nice handwave sometimes when a Chancellor doesn't want to say she's increasing income tax or the business rate at the cost of fucking over the hospitality and construction industries because it's such a blunt instrument.

Imagine if instead we had a government that said 'right lads, we're going to simplify the tax code and while things will go up it will also mean you don't have to mess about.' Then for their next magic trick they could sort out council tax valuations and provide carve-outs on stamp duty so the treasury isn't actively making the broken housing market worse.

>>100278

>'right lads, we're going to simplify the tax code

Has any government ever succeeded at that?

>>100277

Yeah that's why we should have kept the minimum wage at £4.70 or whatever it was in 1995 and everything would be doing tickety boo.

You know what's most annoying about the present situation? Seeing all the conservatives dickheads scathingly attack everything Labour does as thought they've gone full fucking Maoist, when it's the most tentative, tiny baby steps of changes.For the last four months we've heard nothing but RED TORIES TED TORIES RED TORIES, and as soon as they announce anything that can even remotely be considered lefty in spirit, the kind of cunt who reads the telegraph actually believes that means they're full fucking Marxist-Leninists.

It's mental. Everyone needs to get a grip on reality.

>>100280

Half the electorate don't care about public services as long as their taxes don't go up. The other half passionately cares about public services as long as their taxes don't go up.

We think of Telegraph and Guardian subscribers as being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but both demographics are dominated by older, wealthier people. Whether they know it or not, they're engaged in a silent conspiracy to shape society in their interests. That conspiracy is the reason why people can say "someone earning £100k isn't rich" or "BtL landlords are working people" with a straight face. Reeves and Starmer see straight through it, which is why everyone is losing their shit.

>>100279

Estonia, but they're highly atypical for all sorts of reasons.

>>100278

Sometimes I wonder about low productivity figures because in my workplace it's almost entirely the fault of the two directors having too much say and too few planning skills. Nuggets of genius like 'let's plan to run multiple of these things all day tomorrow when we only the have the components to run one'.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a UK phenomenon generally.

>>100278
>The rule of thumb is the 75-100% rule on top of their wage which is already punishing
This sounds like a fudged figure. If it's costing you ten-of-thousands of pounds to find an employee who is willing, literate and numerate then you're doing something hopelessly wrong. Especially, as I've been told on numerous occasions, most vaccancies never even get advertised publically. Even accounting for a loss of produtivity while the new starter gets to grips, and on the job training, I feel as if you only reach this number by including all the wages for everyone who works on finding a new employee in some way.

>>100278
There was a guardian article defending national insurance a little while ago when Hunt suggested abolishing it and it's stuck in my head ever since because it never actually advances a serious argument for them. Instead we get: "it was good in 1911", "they've got 'national' in the name", "they create solidarity because everyone pays them", and "unlike income tax they're not redistributive in principle" (somehow apparently a good thing!!)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/07/the-guardian-view-on-national-insurance-these-taxes-embody-a-solidarity-we-still-need

It really did finalise my view that NICs are indefensibly stupid - and that the guardian will print any old nonsense.

>>100283
I think that's the sustained cost, recruitment is extra. Think of the cost of office space, equipment, admin support, fraction of a manager, employer's NI, pension matching, all that bobbins means the salary you see in the ad isn't nearly the whole cost of adding an employee.
As a small employer, hiring someone is scary. And what if they're shit?

>>100279
A recent one was to pin the AIA (a deductible from taxable profits for making investments) to a figure so businesses could plan year-to-year rather than having an evolving rate.

What always holds back tax reform though is that the public at large is financially illiterate and it's not very sexy for the effort involved. So around the world you just end up with creaking behemoth tax codes overtime that are held together by plasters.

>>100280
Seems like everyone is a Tory in your world.

>>100283
You're not reading this right. The 75-100 rule refers to the additional expense an employer can expect on-top of an employees wage which all adds up for them but which you never see outside of things like pensions contributions. Obviously these costs are pernicious if you're in an industry that uses large amounts of workers with tight overheads where most of your expenses are staffing (hospitality).

>>100286

>Seems like everyone is a Tory in your world

If it walks like a Tory, talks like a Tory, it's probably a fucking Tory. But I will grant you, a lot of Lib Dems don't realise they are Tories.

>>100285
>And what if they're shit?
Then it's probably your fault because you process only attracted shit candidates.

>>100288

IT is lousy with fuckwits, because it's basically impossible to tell if someone knows what they're talking about unless you're a subject matter expert. Outside of a few specific areas, there aren't really any qualifications or certifications that truly demonstrate competency. Competent people often look like they don't do anything because they quietly make sure that everything works, while incompetent people often get an undeserved reputation because they're constantly running around fighting fires and saving the day. It's a really pernicious problem and I imagine it applies to all sorts of other skilled work.

>>100289
It's not that hard to find someone competent. If you find yourself hiring incompetents, then the problem isn't that there are too many incompetents or that they're too hard to distinguish. The problem is that you're not attracting the competent people.

I sometimes hear tech employers complaining about this, and then I go and look at their job adverts and they've got more red flags than Beijing during Party Congress.

>>100290
I don't follow this either. I don't work in IT but even on my end there's been plenty of people we shouldn't have hired but who managed to work the interview process. It's very hard to construct an interview method that is impervious to selecting bad candidates and simultaneously isn't so overly complicated that nobody ever completes the application form.

It's also true that there's a limited number of people who on paper tick all the boxes for a job. Especially the old problem of experiance. But taking a chance on someone who might be great is prohibitively expensive when it goes wrong. You might treat this as an employer problem but it's one that impacts the whole of society and is exacerbated by the skills gap in critical industries and the 'not being a cunt' gap in others if you want to staff a restaurant.

>>100291
>It's very hard to construct an interview method that is impervious to selecting bad candidates and simultaneously isn't so overly complicated that nobody ever completes the application form.
It doesn't need to be impervious to selecting bad candidates. It just needs to be good enough at selecting good enough candidates. Companies often over-engineer their processes trying to make sure they select the best candidate from those on offer, but really you're fine as long as the person you hire is good enough.

It's very rare that someone has an interview process that selects for bad candidates over good candidates. More common is that the organisation's entire hiring process and outlook causes good candidates to filter themselves out. I was recently at an event, and someone from a small tech company was talking about how there's a skills shortage and they're finding it hard to get good candidates. I looked them up, and sure enough they were advertising for a senior engineer - 4 days a week in the office, mandatory unpaid on-call, minimum pension match, no perks, and a £40k salary. Of course they weren't getting any good candidates making those demands for such a derisory package.

Checkmate, Marxists.

>>100293

Technically though, if you've got enough properties that it's actually a 50-hour work week for you to manage them, which it well could be, then why not transfer them into a limited company. You can then employ yourself as the manager. You'll probably save tax that way too. And you've turned yourself from a buy to let leech into a working person in gainful employment.

Checkmate, Lefties.

>Commonwealth leaders have agreed the "time has come" for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK's desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.

>A document signed by 56 heads of government, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, acknowledges calls for "discussions on reparatory justice" for the "abhorrent" transatlantic slave trade. The statement says it is time for a "meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation". Sir Keir said there had been no discussions about money at the meeting, and that the UK is "very clear" in its position that it would not pay reparations.

>For the UK and others, they can say their position isn’t changing and also point to a range of other topics – trade, climate change and security for instance – that, they argue, the Commonwealth offers a vital forum for. However, the prime minister did appear to leave the door open for further discussions about some form of reparatory justice, saying the "next opportunity to look at this" would be at the UK-Caribbean forum.

>Frederick Mitchell, the foreign minister of the Bahamas, said leaders hoped to come up with a "comprehensive report" on the issue at that forum, to be held in London next March. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he expected the UK would eventually pay financial reparations to Caribbean countries. Challenged on whether the wording of the joint statement was too vague, he said: "Behind the language is an attempt to go in a particular direction."

>Diplomats have said they expect reparatory justice to be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time. Last year, a UN judge said the UK likely owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries. One person who supports reparations is the incoming Commonwealth secretary general, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, who was appointed on Friday. She is currently serving as Ghana's foreign minister, and has also backed the drafting of a Commonwealth free trade agreement, according to AFP.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207m3m0xpjo

Okay then, which one of you two has the £18tn we borrowed from the Caribbean?

>>100295

I say we go and ask the Italians if they want to compensate us for that time the Romans invaded us.

Seriously, if all countries asked reparations of each other for all the times in increasingly distant history that they got invaded, colonised, enslaved or whatever else, then before long we'd all be broke.

Didn't Poland ask Germany just recently to pay reparations for WWII?

It's like asking your bully from school 20 years later at the reunion to pay you back for all the wedgies he gave you and the sweets he took from you.

>>100295
This is potentially a very stupid question, but is the Caribbean actually worse off because of the slave trade? Otherwise wouldn't they be a load of no mark countries like Vanuatu and New Caledonia?

>>100297

>but is the Caribbean actually worse off because of the slave trade?

I guess it depends on who you ask. It probably wasn't that popular with the actual slaves.

>>100295
I don't support reparations until there's no more racism. The purpose of reparations is to redress the balance, to redistribute the profits of slavery back to the descendants of the slaves. Once reparations have been paid, we should be all square and able to put the controversy behind us. If we can't do that, there's no point in paying them. But if we paid reparations today, then we would no longer need positive discrimination tomorrow. We would no longer need to reserve places at Eton and Oxbridge for people from minority backgrounds, because society would be all fair and we would have finally moved on from the legacy of racial evil. But people are still racist, especially in the modern way where innocuous things like a slight preference for tennis over basketball will snowball into tennis being on TV every year and basketball not being. For as long as the British Basketball League is less popular than Wimbledon, society is still unequal in ways that slavery reparations will not fix. And this means that black people will still get a worse deal out of life, and they will still be angry that society does not treat them fairly, even if they receive reparations. So why waste the money?

>>100297

It's not my most well studied area of history but as far as I know there basically wouldn't be any countries there if not for the slave trade. There would just be a bunch of little tribal villages like Papua New Guinea or whatever. If you want to be a pedantic cunt you could argue Afro-Carribean people are the colonisers.

It's all a grift, because even if we did pay reparations, whose pockets would that money end up in? Certainly not the average Jamaican povvo, you can guarantee that.

>>100300
>If you want to be a pedantic cunt you could argue Afro-Carribean people are the colonisers.
That's not pedantry, that's just contrarian-ing yourself into being a complete div.

>>100296
>I say we go and ask the Italians if they want to compensate us for that time the Romans invaded us.
Why? The Italians aren't living in a country and an economy built upon the looted wealth of the Romans. That all fucked off when the empire split in two and both halves collapsed. By contrast, a significant amount of the wealth from Britain's involvement in the slave trade is still kicking around today in some form or another.

>>100302
So it's the bastard Normans we need to go after.

>>100303

> the bastard Normans

Yes. Everybody named Sinclair has to pay.

>>100302
>The Italians aren't living in a country and an economy built upon the looted wealth of the Romans

Lad, they literally have a murder-colosseum in their capital that still generates revenue today.

>>100305

https://fortune.com/europe/2022/07/26/how-much-is-the-rome-colosseum-worth-deloitte-report/

>The Colosseum contributes around 1.39 billion euros (around $1.4 billion) a year to Italy’s GDP from tourism and related activities, in addition to employing around 42,700 full-time staff, according to a new report out this week by financial services company Deloitte.


They are clearly in a position to pay us back. That's just one ancient Roman ruin. Imagine how much all of them across Italy generate in annual revenue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-rs6dqemTY

>>100307
>Mike Amesbury's the name, leaving voters out cold is the game

From what I've seen of this, some bloke started on an MP and got battered for it. Instead of the matter being settled he's ran off crying to the police and you can hear the women in the video telling everyone who he is and making sure that they record his face.

There ought to be a law in this country about being a grass.

>>100307
Honestly I suspect most MPs watching that felt their hearts swell with pride and joy, given the amount of mouthy arseholes they have to deal with. It's not always without good reason, but some people are just cunts to MPs because they're thick and they don't know how anything works. This comment got a laugh out of me as well, where do they find these people?
>He’s off to prison for a few years. Hit and kicked the victim. Disgraceful behaviour by an MP

Also this is officially the most exciting thing to ever happen in Frodsham, apart from maybe the time I scrambled up a really steep bit of Frodsham Hill even though I'm dead scared of heights.

>>100308
He did have his hands in his pockets though, that's the thing. Then again if you're daft enough to give a drunk bloke at 2am stick, whether he's an MP or not, and keep your hands in your pockets, maybe you deserve a punch all the more.

>Millions of passengers could face huge bus fare hikes if Rachel Reeves scraps the country-wide £2 cap on Wednesday.

>The Chancellor is expected to abolish the cost-of-living lifeline in order to save the Treasury £350million a year. But campaigners warn this would be a disaster.

>Worst-hit places could see fares jump by over £10 per journey, with critics saying that scrapping the cap would drive people off public transport. Leaked research at the weekend suggests that every £1 spent on the measure generates between 71p and 90p in benefits. This means it is "not financially sustainable" for taxpayers or bus operators analysis for the Department for Transport (DfT) concludes.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fury-2-bus-fare-cap-33980072

It's about time those who take the bus were taken down a peg or two.

>>100310
Only people who earn over 100k can afford public transport anyway. Us working people must take advantage of alternative forms of transport like the private motorcar and long-term unemployment.

>>100310
Remember when the Labour right's line was that we shouldn't renationalise railways because the money would be better spent on bus services, and poorer people use trains less than the bus?
I'm glad to see that was all good faith concern for the worst off and not just some old bollocks to save face while opposing a popular policy...

>>100311

>Only people who earn over 100k can afford public transport anyway.

For longer journeys, you can still take a Megabus. Some of their routes are still reasonably priced. I just checked, Manchester to London is about 10 quid one-way. If you are going in the evening and don't mind arriving past midnight. Although, when you think about it, it seems a bit like those flights that are cheap because they're at very inconvenient times. Where your flight back goes at 4am or something.

>>100314
Not really gonna help people with their commute to work, with local bus journeys now going up by 50%.

>>100314

Why does the Megabus man have big tits?

>>100315

No, not with their commutes, but at least you can go to London for 10 quid.

Or to a job interview if the job centre sends you further afield.

Admit it, you've always wanted to stock shelves in Congleton.

>>100316
There's no need to body shame Megabus Sid.

>>100318

I remember having a Megabus in front of me now and then when they still had him as the mascot, and after a few miles, it did kind of make you feel uncomfortable to have him looking at you the whole time.

How about they take the free bus pass off pensioners? I bet that'd save more than putting fares up by a quid.

>>100319
I wonder what it's like inside the Megabus. Would you be able to see those giant eyes over where the window should be?

>>100321

>I wonder what it's like inside the Megabus

Presumably, an aroma of failed deodorant and sweaty feet, coupled with ten different Eastern European languages. And heaps of plastic- and travel bags to climb over in the aisle.

Oh, come on! Look at him! Imagine losing your job because you punched this bloke.

>>100321
>>100322
They're pretty nice. They're just coaches, the one I've used is about as pleasnt as a Pendolino, whilst being far cheaper and, at least the route I took way, way faster than any actual train, although to be fair I did want to go from west to east, which is obviously insane and not something a railway could ever be used for. Why would they be full of plastic and Eastern Europeans? Or lack overhead storage?

>>100323

To be fair, you don't just get Eastern Europeans on Megabuses. You also get Africans, hungover students and people who are talking to themselves.

>>100324
I don't know, mate. Maybe the Birmingham to Cambridge route is especially refined and my experiences are unrepresentative and usually the Megabus is a portal to all manner of nightmares. But you just sound like one of those Mailheads who thinks people who wear trainers need locking up. Why are they trying to move so fast, eh? What are they up to?!

In my experience Megabuses are also just coaches. Nothing like the horror stories you hear about American Greyhounds. Luck of the draw if one will be comfortable or not depending on what seat design they happen to have, same as Nat Express. I could just be unlucky but they do seem to break down a lot.

>The minimum wage for over 21s, known officially as the National Living Wage, will rise by 6.7%, from £11.44 to £12.21 from April 2025. This year, it increased to £11.44 an hour, from £10.42.

>For 18 to 20-year-olds, the minimum wage will rise from £8.60 to £10. In April this year, the rate was increased from £7.49.

>Apprentices will get the biggest pay bump, from £6.40 to £7.55 an hour. Prior to this year, it was £5.28.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y37wqnvwxo

I agree with this measure, but it makes the decision to increase employers national insurance look like lunacy.

>>100337

They need to make some kind of rule where when the minimum wage goes up, that other jobs which only pay a bit over minimum wage should go up proportionally too. Or maybe we need some kind of law about mandatory wage increases for length of service or something. This already overtakes the raise they gave NHS workers earlier this year for the lower bandings.

Obviously I am never going to be against raising the minimum wage but I left the NHS basically expressly because of this. The pension isn't great any more, there's scant few opportunities for training and progression any more. Why do such a stressful demanding job with few prospects, when I can walk into any other job for practically the same money?

>>100338
Your CMB profile will suffer, for one.

>>100338
I have a friend who used to be a doorman with a very similar mindset. When he started ~15 years ago he was on roughly double the minimum wage, but now many jobs advertised are either at minimum wage or close to it. It doesn't help that the market also became oversaturated due to the DWP sending loads of people without a job on the course to be qualified to be a doorman.

>>100339

You definitely don't want to date nurses, m8.

>>100323
>Imagine losing your job because you punched this bloke

I can understand it. I'd hit him.

I’m not enjoying watching this Budget. Why are Labour women all so ugly? Tory psychopath ladies are always babes, but here I am watching Rachel Reeves with occasional shots of Bridget Phillipson. Yuck. I don’t enjoy being made to feel like a naughty schoolboy by frowning mong-voiced grumps.

>>100347
https://x.com/richard_kaputt/status/1846636347207176553

I'd forgotten how weird Rishi Sunak is.

>>100350
He really bellows like a great statesman, but he smiles while he’s doing so because he just loves the fun of it all. He’s meant to be angry but he looks like he’s playing on the Be As Angry As Possible ride at Alton Towers.