Given that a hard Brexit will be guaranteed under a Tory majority, I can't see an angle that they could push to blame it on anyone but themselves. This Labour party is far more effective and competent than it is ever given credit for in the media, so when the economy has crashed and people are looking for change, the obvious option will be Labour.
UK General Election - 12th December 2019 | Con 365, Lab 203, LD 11, SNP 48, Other 23 - Tory Majority of 80
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This isn't true Volumiza, and we've been through it before. It was only one of a number of proposals to come out of a study commissioned by Labour and which Labour never endorsed. Labour certainly never took up the figure of 115k and Mcdonnell said on Sky that the idea of a lifetime gifts tax was itself merely one of a number of proposals being looked at. Of course the press took this interview and declared it evidence of a defacto assault on middle class families, but this analysis has patently been found wanting. You can tell this is true because you now have the manifesto and costing document and can freely discover that a lifetime gifts tax is neither proposed nor even mentioned, while the scaremongering sum of 115k per beneficiary is in fact 325k per parent.
Well let's hope so.
So you're voting to keep a party in that actually enacted these policies, in order to keep out a party that you think might enact a version that directly impacts you.
It shouldn't have been a choice though. When Bush and co came knocking, he should have told them piss off. If he was less morally bankrupt than he is, he would have never allowed Britain to become involved in such a thing. Don't con yourself into thinking that Blair did it in some sense of moral righteousness, he did it because he was told to do it.
I don't agree with or believe that. It's too simplistic. The US didn't need Britain's military help. I believe Blair did it because he wanted to, thought it was the right thing to do and was a low political risk. He even gave a speech about his doctrine of moral interventionism in 1999, way before Iraq. He was of course staggeringly wrong but it was not clear at the time, especially post Serbia, that military action against a country to kick out a dangerous, cruel and corrupt regime, was the morally wrong thing to do (and it really only became obviously the wrong thing to do because the outcome was so incredibly destructive).
(I didn't support Iraq because I couldn't see evidence of why it threatened the UK. All the sexing up of dossiers was designed to manufacture such evidence BTW).
A lot of stuff online right now about US trade negotiators requesting access to NHS patient data. I take it when leave the EU, GDPR will no longer apply so we'll be pretty much powerless to do anything about it.
And then this from Hancock...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...g-birth-ambitions-laid/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fb
I think the conclusions you can draw from that are predictably grim.
And then this from Hancock...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...g-birth-ambitions-laid/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fb
I think the conclusions you can draw from that are predictably grim.
Even if that is the case, which it is not, because in the original FT article it is not explained who would be affected (here it is: https://www.ft.com/content/dc17d7ee-ccab-11e9-b018-ca4456540ea6), this clarification or even if we call it a change of direction of something that is neitheir policy, pledge or even ever discussed at NEC, doesn't it show that they're capable of looking at proposals objectively for the benefit of everyone rather than press ahead with damaging effects?
Just comes across as a classic British move in the middle East. Topple dictator, flatten country, install compliant government, charge for rebuild. This has happened so often in the middle East over the last 100 years, that it's hard to believe Blair had different intentions.
It wasn't even so much the wrong thing to do; it's that they did feckall strategic planning around what would happen after they overthrew him. I was still military (a young maths/analytics nerd not rambo) back then, and the general staff didn't have any guidance or clue about what to do. There were serious and both high and low level warnings going off left right and centre, but the politicians simply weren't hearing it. It was a red haze and the military both in the US and UK were unprepared to stand up to the politicians and say "Look, this is a disaster, we have no idea about the culturally operational implications, and both our people and civilians will die." I'd go as far as to say the chain of command did not work properly, either in the US or the UK.
And Wes Clark was right to plan that way with Serbia, even if the suits hated it.
And tell him that's because Gordon Brown committed us to hundreds of billions of extra spending that we will be paying off for decades. It's not a tap you can just turn off one day, but it has been reduced over those 9 years.
Hold on, there are still people that think the US declared war on Iraq because they wanted to remove the bad man in charge?
I mean Trump is a proper melt but at least he admits they're only in Syria for the oil.
I mean Trump is a proper melt but at least he admits they're only in Syria for the oil.
If the Gordon Brown government committed us to so much extra spending, why is every public service absolutely fecked? What has been reduced over 9 years? The debt has tripled. Services have been cut to the bone. Where has the money gone? TAX CUTS!
It wasn't a British move, it was an American project and Blair was Bush's lapdog. We eased a bit of the financial burden for them and offered some of our troops for fodder.
I'm talking about why Blair probably backed it. The US reasons are another whole ball game.
It's currently unknown what will happen, but in practice it would be all but impossible for the UK to not have near identical data laws as the EU, because GDPR would still apply to EU businesses operating in the UK, and to UK businesses operating in the EU.
Yeah, US companies operating in the EU all have to be GDPR compliant. We will still be subject to it.
The tax take has actually been pretty unchanged. Let's not give the Tories credit for cutting our taxes - they haven't.
(source: IFS)
Quite right... In fact the tax burden has gone up quite considerably if you compare taxation nowadays with the average figure during (particularly the earlier) New Labour years.
That’s the irony of the parties using a terrorist attack as election leverage.
The UK and US have been the worlds biggest terrorists for hundreds of years. Just look at what the UK did to Ireland as an example.
We are basically scouse at this point.
The tax take has actually been pretty unchanged. Let's not give the Tories credit for cutting our taxes - they haven't.
(source: IFS)
The tax take doesn't mean there have not been tax cuts. If we had same level of taxation for higher rate and corporations as in 2010, the tax revenues would be quite a lot higher, we would have required less borrowing, less public spending cuts and have smaller debt.
Blair's power delusion started during Clinton's Lewinsky impeachment . If you remember, he provided Clinton a character reference in front of US/UK TV, and in doing so, implanted the seed of his global importance into his mind. Blair changed dramatically after this, seeking to become a global statesman, despite still being very early into his PM tenure.
I always found it odd how Blair immediately schmoozed upto Bush, despite them being at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. As soon as 9/11 happened, Blair jumped at the chance to be involved in war to acquire global importance, despite 9/11 having nothing to do with him. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would certainly have always happened, but there was zero reason for UK to have gotten involved, to the extent that we did. We have to remember that no other NATO nation volunteered its soldiers in the 'coalition of the willing'. I don't think Blair was a lapdog; he was a willing and passionate advocate for Bush agenda.
It's also farcical with hindsight to talk about any moral justification. There was none. The Iraq war was simply the end of the Bush family feud with Sadam Hussien and oil. I wonder how many young people learning about Iraq war for first time know Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, the false links of WMD, the sexed up dossiers and the suspicious death of Dr Kelly, Abu Graib etc. It's a very shady era of British history where many crimes were committed by Government and Army people. As I wrote in my earlier post, it's unforgivable, and rightly overshadows any positive achievements Blair might have achieved.
Blairs bromance with Bush was purely on his own narcissist desires to become a playa of global importance (cf: his infamous ‘Blair Doctrine’ mentioned earlier by @nickm). The UK is still paying this price, with terrorist acts like the one over the weekend, let alone Iraq and the region.
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American projection of power [foreign policy] has always been about 'Righteous Might' ever since the Spanish-American war, or even since 1877. You may not think much of Bush or whatever, but the idea that they were there 'for the oil' is so hugely and verifiably wrong. Of course there has always been the standard pulse of maximalist and retrenchment, but the general guiding theory has been such for ages.
(And this post has made me very sad. There is an excellent book by Stephen Sestanovich called 'Maximalist' about US foreign policy since WWII that touches on this, and I just tried to find it as I'm going away wednesday and haven't read it in a long while! However, it seems 'lost'
)Your analysis is misleading, to say the least. There have also been significant tax rises which more than offset the cuts in the headline rates you mention, including increases in dividend taxes, reductions in pension tax relief for those with incomes above £100,000 and increases to insurance premium tax, as well as closing of various tax offsetting measures, lowering allowances (including on pension contributions), stamp duty surcharges, diverted profits tax, bank levy, apprenticeship levy etc.
The Tories' whole tax plan has been to cut headline tax rates to make people think they're a tax cutting government, while changing the rules, reliefs and indirect taxes to make up the lost revenue. You've fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
I would recommend reading through this: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/9178. The idea that the Tories have cut our taxes is simply wrong and they should not be credited with it.
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Likewise if we had the same rate of insurance taxes, council taxes, dividend taxes, SDLT, fuel taxes, car taxes, business rates... Not to mention fiscal drag whereby the 40% tax rate was set at £37,400 earnings back in 2010 but despite inflation remains at £37,500 today.
It's actually strange that there are no parties offering lower taxations in the UK at present.
American projection of power [foreign policy] has always been about 'Righteous Might' ever since the Spanish-American war, or even since 1877. You may not think much of Bush or whatever, but the idea that they were there 'for the oil' is so hugely and verifiably wrong. Of course there has always been the standard pulse of maximalist and retrenchment, but the general guiding theory has been such for ages.
(And this post has made me very sad. There is an excellent book by Stephen Sestanovich called 'Maximalist' about US foreign policy since WWII that touches on this, and I just tried to find it as I'm going away wednesday and haven't read it in a long while! However, it seems 'lost'
Oh come on. Post WW2 interventions were pretty much linked to business opportunities. Some like Lebanon and Grenada were political but the standard method was to remove nationalist leaders (commies for easy branding) install a right-wing strongman, sell them loads of arms and negotiate lucrative business deals for US companies to exploit mineral wealth and other natural resources.
I dunno man; there was a brutal regime there, and the world should not have sat idly buy and let it go. I'd say the same for Syria, North Korea, and China (Though obviously dealing with a superpower is way more tricky) right now, as well as a few other places. I see a lot more problems with the post invasion strategy, the inability to understand Iraqi culture at all, and specifically the chasing of Iraqi generals and others from the Saddam era who could have kept it together. Instead those generals ended up in PoW camps being radicalised and ISIS was born. Those Sunni Baathists along with others they recruited along the way were the vital tinder for IS to gain steam. Those who weren't radicalised simply hated the Shiite powers in Iraq and Americans enough to join forces.
Dissolving the entire Baath party and banning even lowly middle managers from doing anything was a monumental feckup.
Well... my personal opinion is that the Tory party are proposing a Brexit that appeals predominantly to a certain type of voter... the right wing populist type. It's pretty clear from the way they campaign and the fact they have taken on practically all of the Brexit party vote... a party headed by Nigel Farage, a right wing populist.
During the cold war and small scale conflicts sure; though I'd argue it was also about 'rebranding culturally to Americanism.'
To be fair, my initial post was somewhat misguided. I'd argue that large scale conflict (Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Iraq I etc) were not done for financial gain, and though you can argue for and against each on their merits, are an indicator of how the US has worked.
I don't subscribe to the theory that outside of Latin America the USA has been a big bad bully for the last 80 years.
Edit: You could also argue that support for Israel, the Marshall plan, and a whole lot of other stuff had an altruistic component. They royally screwed the UK on land lease and did similar deals round the world though so swings and roundabouts...
This isn't the thread for this but I think you are very wrong. Iran coup alone has fecked up the world immeasurably.
Agreed on both counts. The Iran coup was a travesty. (And the only reason that Israel/UK didn't get away with Suez was because they didn't consult them first, would have been another one)
Agree to disagree on the main point.
FFS. Just got a big honking "Cost of Corbyn" Tory mobile ad pop up at the bottom of this thread. The way it sat made it look like an image attachment.
All the polls seem to be drifting to within that 7% margin that I've seen a few experts forecast would likely result in a hung parliament or a slim Tory majority.
It's the hope that kills you.
I don't know where you have that from but its not outright debt, debt as a percentage of GDP or any other figure i can find.
Gordon Brown committed us to spending based on a Labour view of tax and spend, and the economy as it was in the 2000s. It was all ok until he then attempted to increase spending further still by encouraging the banks to make even more money. When 2008 duly happened and the economy tanked, we were left with the spending commitments and not the GDP to back it up. We have been trying to balance the economy ever since.
What concerns me on this election is that Corbyn wants to commit us to spending far beyond that, at a time when we have still not fully recovered from 2008 and we have a massive uncertainty looming in the shape of Brexit. Anyone with even the slightest understanding of economics can see it is absolutely crazy what he wants to do.
Polls have been within the margin of error forever. The drift simply puts them even further into that territory.
Debt has not tripled by any relevant metric.
Browns spending was logical. The 3% deficit was and has never been the problem. Yes, he could have run a surplus and done things differently, but there were no major economic errors. And you say 'duly happened' like he had a crystal ball. Hindsight was 20/20. Didn't look like a regular boom/bust cycle as most of the growth was finance/housing. Subprime was not his fault or predictable by him.
Whatever Gordon Brown did or did not accomplish, he will be forever associated with laying foundations for Brexit and I don't just mean by keeping us out of the Euro… although that did help too!
It was not but the predicament he allowed and encouraged UK banks to get into was his fault. He had been pushing to relax regulation and increase their contribution for years because he needed the GDP to support his spending plans. It was reckless to have put the country in a position that when there was a downturn, as there always is, we were so exposed. We were very lucky that two of our biggest in HSBC and Barclays were relatively unscathed.
Corbyn's spending plans would be doing the exact same thing again on a much larger scale.
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