General Election 2019 thread

The IFS says neither Labour nor the Conservatives' fiscal plans are "a properly credible prospectus".

The group's main criticisms of Labour include the party not being able to deliver investment spending increases on the scale they promise.

It also says it would be highly likely that Labour, at least over the longer-term, would need to implement other tax raising measures in order to raise the £80bn of tax revenue they want.

On the party's promise to compensate those women hit by changes to the pension age, the IFS says most in the group are relatively well off and that "to believe the whole group should receive compensation is a recipe for complete stasis in policy.”

On the Conservatives, the IFS says their “die in a ditch” style promise to exit the transition period by the end of 2020 could mean something like “no deal”, which could harm economy and increase debt.

It also says the party failed to come up with any kind of plan or money for social care - and that the promise nobody would need to sell their house is an uncosted aspiration.

On spending, the IFS says Conservative plans, if delivered, would leave public service spending outside of health still 14% lower in 2023-24 than it was in 2010-11.

No more austerity perhaps, but an awful lot of it is baked in, the group says.

Now let's have a look at what the Institute for Fiscal Studies says about Lib Dem spending plans.

IFS director Paul Johnson says that compared with the Tories and Labour, the Liberal Democrats are "the most fiscally prudent" in terms of the public finances.

However, he says that given the uncertainty around Brexit, it's very difficult to say whether the Lib Dems or any other party would be able to deliver their plans.

The Lib Dem manifesto plans would ordinarily be seen as "radical", with big spending increases, and big tax increases, but the plans are "very much dwarfed" by what's in the Labour manifesto, he adds.

The IFS us the "go to" organisation when it comes to economic analysis.

Johnson and Farage to be empty chaired on C4 climate change debate if they don't show up

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-climate-change-debate-channel-4-empty-chair-general-election-ice-sculpture-a9222771.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1574942543

Channel 4 refused to comment on reports that it had commissioned an ice sculpture of Mr Johnson to melt during the show if he declines to attend.

But doing nothing is not an option

Then at least come out with numbers that are practical and achievable, not this nonsense. They should be honest.

Say that to the Tories as well and then we have a consensus. This is not a party political issue.

The Labour weakness is that they are pretending that this uplift to average European levels of State investment / spending can be done without a more broad based tax raising programme. As the IFS points out this is not a tenable position.
Equally untenable is for a Tory Party to preside over a set of policies that has left families living in containers, people dying, homeless, on the streets, to reduce the NHS to a point of crisis.
And, to put Labours financial analysis into perspective, do all that and manage to double our national debt to nearly £2Trillion.

So when judging the parties for this election we have two parties, one (Labour) talking sh**, and one (Tory) whose actual performance IS sh**.

I'm not sure they are that far off on the trees.

One single mechanised tree planter running 12 hours a day can plant 2000 trees. So 4 of those on a site can plant 8000 per day. So you would only need 30 or so sites across the whole of the UK to hit that target actually. Interestingly the manual method is nearly as fast.

Finland plant about 175 million trees every year. Thats 3.5 billion over 20 years and they find space for it in a country that already has 10 trees per every person on earth.