It just seems ridiculous, you aren’t going to out Tory the Tory’s, what’s the point? Reform are doing that and now the Tory’s are finally in a vote splitting position.
Westminster Politics 2024-2029
- Thread starter Pexbo
- Start date
Wokeanistan.
As repulsive as Lowe is, does the Spanish state provide and pay for the warm weather and fackin burgers or do Brits attend the venue as invited by the state?
Weird Venn diagram of Benidorm hating Brits and left wingers pretending they care about working class Brits
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Well, other than the bit about pensions I already mentioned, they're queuing up to kiss Trump's arse, nothing they've done suggests they are going to tackle the landlordism problems, they've locked up protesters for the longest sentences ever seen, so hardly change in policy on crime.
Hates wealth? We literally just had them abandon plans to tax ultra rich non-doms after a little bit of pressure. Hate business? They're racing to climb into bed with the likes of Blackrock and flailing around trying to attract investment by endorsing AI bullshit powered by untested nuclear tech!
I must have also missed them increasing benefits for migrants too.
Cowardly, all things like this do is make undecideds think "Well, if they're copying Reform, then Reform must be right".
This has to come first, otherwise its a perpetual state of Austerity... 'lite' with Labour, 'full fat' with Tories and it will be 'sh** for breakfast' with Reform.
You really do have a distorted view of the past. The Conservatives were actively campaigning to lessen regulation at the time. If they had won the 2005 GE, then how much worse would it have been?
And no, austerity wasn't needed, and it certainly didn't help. Austerity has its place, namely when a country is experiencing a sustained period of economic growth, but implementing it around a recession/recovery is just gross incompetence. It's basic Keynesian economics that's backed up by easily obtained empirical evidence of the time. The US, China, and later Germany all implemented huge stimulus packages. Compare their outcome to the UK, Greece (though not necessarily their choice), Spain and Italy, who pursued harsh austerity measures.
I think we all know that, it's more that all they're doing is saying the word, rather than making it possible.
If economic growth was really their key priority then there is a still a big white elephant in the room that they are scared to talk about. Which makes me think growth isn't really their priority.
Who cares what the shadow cabinet says they'll do? We all know both sides in opposition say anything they think will get a soundbite.
Austerity worked very well post recession and any economic indicator you choose will show that. We left the last Labour government with massively inflated public spending commitments and it was imperative that was brought back under control. As you mention Germany, from mid 2011 UK GDP growth outstripped Germany in 13 of the next 17 quarters.
They are not magicians, saying something doesn't make it so. It is very clear that without growth in the economy, the best that can be hoped for is austerity 'lite'. Any chance of 'moving the dial' permantly in favour of the majority of the population, needs the impetus of sustained growth.
I would say to anyone who calls them self a Labour supporter (left, right or centre) now is the time to stop moaning and put your shoulder to the wheel. If it doesn't happen in the next decade then God help those now under the age of thirty.
The danger isn't from the Tory's they are a spent force, its from Reform.
Well that's exactly my point. They're saying words and following up with either no action or actions that actively work against their goals.
I'd like to see them try things out like temporarily reducing VAT on things like restaurant meals and alcohol in pubs, to help the hospitality industry, getting people out and using them rather than watching it all collapse like a house of cards, shrinking the economy further still.
Or maybe announcing schemes that aren't pure fantasy like AI centres and untested SMR nuclear power stations and carbon capture. They could be plowing that pledged money into domestic energy conservation schemes, employing local contractors. Or building some social housing so that councils have assets and financial security rather than getting fleeced by private landlords for decades to come.
Tory scumbags like her should not have a platform.
You sound like David Cameron & George Osbourne's PR spokesperson!
Forget the rosette (they don't deserve to wear any), what should the UK government be doing in your opinion? If the Tories won the last election, what would they be doing right now?
What a fecking joke. I wish that Labour were anywhere near as left wing as you think it is.
Labour saying things the UKIP of 2010, when I came to this country, would never say.
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It's interesting how much blame you put on Labour for the aftermath of the 08 crash but Brexit, which surely has to go down as one of the most spectacular acts of self sabotage by any country in recent history, is waved away as "we decided to have a referendum", and not as something the Tories should be blamed for.
Cowardly is the right word. It's been a feature of neo-liberal politics for a generation. Delegate responsibility as far from you as possible. Easiest way is to palm it of to the markets like the above, and that comes with the added benefit of keeping donors happy.
Politics is now just a bunch of middle-managers who are able to play the "stay on script" game against politics journalists that try to catch them out for no other reason than to gloat about it. Just a carry on from their university debating society days that they've never moved on from because they never left the bubble to gain life experience outside.
Yep it’s strategy that never works at stopping the right.
Also the next election is years away and labour currently have a massive majority there’s really no excuse. Which probably means we should question do they genuinely care about this topic or was it simply another pledge to win over progressives but always destined to be dropped.
They're just so left-wing though!
A government with a massive majority had the freedom to overhaul the economy sapping regulation and tax regimes. Cut corporation tax and VAT, and fix business rates. Simplify tax codes, increase income tax a percentage or two and ditch Net Zero. Build HS2, expand Heathrow, widen roads, approve new power generation infrastructure. Transport and energy are amongst the best things you can invest in to grow an economy.
There were many, many things that could have been done but instead they wasted the opportunity of a lifetime on a few empty giveaways to their mates.
God knows what the Tories would be doing but it could not be any worse than the current lot. This is a new low.
I think I've always been clear Brexit was going to be a disaster, has been a disaster, and Cameron and all involved should never be allowed to forget it.
Reducing VAT might give a temporary blip, but if large swathes of people have no money to spend on 'eating out' then it wont last long and wont help the economy to grow.
AI centres and SMR nuclear power stations are not a dream, they are a necessity in their own right and a longer term boost for the economy, i.e. not just to survive , but to grow it.
Housing is a big issue, the building of, the insulation of, and the sites to be used; however, this is best done from a standing start and whether we like it or not that is where we start. Workers need to be found, trained etc. in both traditional and new build techniques, the best energy conservation is built into houses/offices etc. during their construction, not when they are already finished; 'after thought' conservation is tampering at the best and cost more than it saves, at worst.
One of your local MPs (Ashton-u-lyne) is the deputy PM and is beginning to make it clear how far she is prepared to go to release land, change planning rules, take back control by the state in building affordable social housing, its the first 'notch on the dial' and will need nerves of steel by the government just to get things moving.
This I agree has to start within 2 years, the former Construction Industry Training Boards (or derivatives of), with their levy arrangements will be needed in order to hit the ground running.
Housing is the biggest issue, and solving the main issue of affordability solves issues like the hospitality sector by simply giving people more disposable income to spend on 'non-essentials' - given the workers needed I do think they'll need to import some Poles etc though
So now we don't care what happens globally, or what would've happened under different leadership, because it makes it more difficult to pin the blame on Labour?
It would also be important to note in the 6 years preceding Brexit, Germany's GDP grew at a faster average rate than it did in the UK. In that time, they still managed spend an average of €60b a year more on their health services, and astonishingly, reduced their debt ratio by 13 points. The UK under the Conservatives? It went up by 10 points...
So to summarise:
Germany grew faster than the UK
Spent more on public services
Reduced their national debt ratio, while the UKs increased.
Germany, the US, Australia, China, Poland, Sweden, Canada, all used stimulus packages and saw great results. The UK, Italy, Spain and Portugal however...
It's like you're just hoping we can't be arsed to look at all the available data.
Edit: Just to expand on this further, I thought I would give you the benefit of doubt, and try to see it from your perspective, to see if I could find anyone unaffiliated with right wing politics who shared your views. I'm really struggling here. Can you lend a hand? Almost all well respected economists, like Krugman and Stiglitz were, shall we say, less than complimentary of the Conservatives approach.
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They are in so much as the fact that nobody is using them, despite being talked about for a couple of decades now, they will be opposed by anyone within a 100 mile radius and will - if they are ever green-lit - take a decade or more to come online. And AI centres will achieve what for us, exactly? Other than consuming vast amounts of energy and water while replacing people's jobs at the same time? What's the goal with, it other than being a buzzword for ministers too incompetant to ask what it's for and how it will actually benefit any of us.
The last vestiges of class-based voting:
@Sweet Square what's the British equivalent to that chuck Schumer quote (lose a rural worker in Western Pennsylvania to pick up two suburban housewives in Philly)
@Sweet Square what's the British equivalent to that chuck Schumer quote (lose a rural worker in Western Pennsylvania to pick up two suburban housewives in Philly)
Wes Streeting's Repatriation Game coming to BBC One in 2026
Corporation tax has already been slashed over the past 15 years. The Tories put up by 5% after the Truss disaster because they'd already cut it to the bone and had to backtrack on their long term policy when they had to deal with inflation for the first time since taking power. Even after that it's still 5% lower than it was when they took over. Cutting it further and passing the burden on to PAYE tax payers is ridiculously regressive.
If you want infrastructure spending for projects like HS2 and extra runways then where is that money coming from if you're cutting corp tax, vat etc? I assume your not a fan of government borrowing, so it would mostly fall on income tax receipts. So not just shifting all the current burden onto workers, but actively increasing it.
Simplifying tax codes and business rates should be addressed. Bigger priorities need addressing first. Which this government is not doing.
On regulations - which ones need sapping?
I hate myself for responding to this because your history shows how you’ll respond, but this is the biggest load of bollocks I’ve ever read!
‘Every economic indicator’ shows austerity was a good thing - let’s take a look growth, GDP, GDP per capita, government debt. All stagnated / got worse because of austerity. Massive public spending cuts, gutting the safety net that a generation of people relied on, and debt went UP, work that one out!!!
Brown and Darling got a framework together for both the US and EU to follow, and then he lost the election based on lies that you repeat on hear every time you show up! They used these frameworks, we didn’t, and look what happened. Results are here for you to see in EVERY sector, in EVERY city, everyone is on their proverbial knees, sclerotic and broken to the core.
Also, 13/17 quarters from 2011 takes us right up until 2016, good job nothing else happened then to make things even worse.
But yeah, keep spouting BS about selling gold or some shit.
Here are the figures. You can clearly see UK GDP growth comfortably outstrips Germany during the 2011-2016 time period.
You seem unable to separate the pre and post 2016 Tories. Before Brexit the Tories were doing a very good job as all data shows. GDP, deficit, whatever you choose. All were improving post 2010.
We have a simple problem with a complex solution. It's too difficult to get anything done in this country and there is little financial incentive to do it.
How do we get things done? Since 2000 the tax regulation word count has roughly doubled, as have others. The answer to that one is easy. Tell the NIMBYs to feck off and start building stuff again.
The more difficult one is how to incentivise it all. Raising taxes reduces tax receipts, the Laffer Curve is a concept the left never seems to understand. Business drives growth, not individuals, so every incentive needs to be given to get them doing that and there is a tight link between the best performing economies and low business taxation. You can fund those business tax cuts from borrowing or individual taxes, ideally a bit of both. To balance the books it's a trade off worth making as the reward will be economic growth that benefits everybody.
Your other option would be to divert that extra revenue from the private sector towards government projects. Less efficient maybe, but still a positive. Build new roads, railways, power plants, data centres and other useful infrastructure. Don't, whatever you do, just give it to segments of your voter base as handouts.
You've said this a few times, but I'm still struggling to know what you're referring to.
Singapore on the Thames then
Who cares what Germany do?
Have a play around with this..
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/GBR
Winning the GDP league means feck all in real life.
You sure about that?
And here's GDP per capita:
And wage growth
The BOE interest rates stayed below 0.75% for over a decade (the first time this has happened in over 300 years). This has coupled unhealthy asset appreciation with wage stagnation, giving us a generational wealth gap that has ruined the prospects of working age families.
But we can quibble all we like. Paul Krugman wrote a superb long read a few years back that really hits home how terrible austerity has been for the UK. Give it a read.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion
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Incredible!
A point is made by a world-renowned economist, but he’s a liberal so it doesn’t count! Also conveniently ignoring the fact that his article was from 2015, killing your ‘fast becoming a parody newspaper’ argument.
I wonder what you’d class as a non-parody newspaper?
When you're denouncing a Nobel prize winning economist because he wrote an article in the Guardian, you aren't interested in conversation. If you bothered to read the article, you would have seen he has referenced the supposed champions of austerity at the time, who have all since distanced themselves from what is largely seen as a catastrophic move. This includes the OBR, who admitted they massively underestimated the negative impact of growth caused by austerity. And the IMF (who I see you have no issue quoting yourself) whose own study in 2016 concluded Osborne's approach caused slower growth. I'd link you, but I know you won't read it.
There's a clear distinction between countries that used stimulus packages and those that used austerity as demonstrated in my nice, easy to understand graph above. You want to ignore the US, China etc because the comparison doesn't look good. You also want to ignore that many of the countries you choose to compare us to, went about austerity in a very different way. They closed deficits not by cutting public sector spending, but by raising taxes, the results of which are there for all to see.