This Government

Let’s hope Bolsanaro accepts the result and goes quietly. 

f**k me, if you ever wondered how serious the Tories take ruling the country - Handcock suspended for going to join Im a Celeb instead of representing his constituents

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63471923

Don't Tories usually enjoy the combination of whips and suspension? 🤭

This thread is pretty lol. A selection of entrants come in, get properly torn to ribbons and then generally delete their account or leave.

It’s a curious thing politics.

You may be curious to learn that I have one foot abroad, and dependent on how much they will want off me personally over the next 10-15 years, I have an escape lane.

Regardless of party: Both Labour and the Tories are in a bind. We have found the limit of how much we can borrow to fund either tax cuts or public spending.

We will therefore be forced to decide: Do we want services, or lower taxes? If the former, taxes go up. If the latter, services are cut. We are back to the old days, of having to balance the books.

I predict a Labour win at the next GE, and a huge boost to the NHS and public budgets paid for by taxes on higher earners. At which point you will mostly be happy to know I’ll be booking the plane flight to Asia, where I can earn the same but pay about 1/5th in tax.

I actually want Labour in now. We will force the competing ideologies to a head and no longer have this middle path of just banging it on the credit card. It’s going to get very 1970s very quickly. This is dependent on what kind of Labour, whether it’s a business friendly labour or a harder left labour.

The tories aren’t fit to keep this up (unless RS can get the economy in check for the next GE)

I get that long term the things labour do might be to the benefit of the country, but Im not willing to sacrifice the next 20 years to build a better Britain when I could be much better off elsewhere.

Another 5% on HRT or another NI hike, loss of personal allowances and you really do get to the point when you think, what’s the point? Why am I working a 60 hr week, when for marginally less I can do a much easier job and have more free time? The benefit of this is I have been promised slightly better NHS wait times, of which I have zero confidence that will happen, 5 years later it will be “stretched to the limit” again like it’s been my entire life.

It’s going to be an ugly decade and I do feel sympathy because I don’t think anyone is having a good next ten years.

Interesting thoughts. I presume your Asian destination will not be China! But I suspect you’re right about the next decade being ‘ugly’ for some. Probably the same people for whom the austerity years were ugly. It will be the people at the bottom of the income scale who will suffer, as they always do. Inflation will be the biggest brake to living standards as it usually is for everyone. 
Lots of problems for Sunak but as you mentioned, if RS could get the economy in check by the next election then perhaps still a chance the Conservatives could win. A big if!!

I literally predicted that last part would be your comment as I posted that.

I’m still quite confused with the term “austerity”. Taxation went up dramatically post great financial crash. As an example, the annual allowance for pensions went from £246,000 to £50,000 and then later to £40,000. VAT increased, personal allowance disappeared for earnings over £100k. No family allowance if one partner earns over £60k.

It’s not like we’ve lowered taxes. We’ve been taxed more post GFC, so it’s hard to understand how much more taxes should have been raised to to have not had to cut the cloth in public services.

We still run a deficit. Actual austerity would have involved mass layoffs to cut the PSNCR.

I used “austerity” because most people understand it was the period following the 08 crash and if you didn’t notice the impact it had then you were fortunate. In two jobs in education during that time I changed from a headteacher to a headteacher/social worker dealing with the problems it produced, yet my job never changed!
I guess we all see any period in terms of our own experiences that we had during it, good or bad. If you were fortunate to have been largely unaffected by it or you see it in terms of a paper exercise all about numbers then you will have a different view from those who saw the impact on children, families and people and spent many years very close to the impact of “austerity.” And as I’ve said many times on here, it’s always the children, people and families on the lowest incomes or those who are the wrong side of the benefits thresholds who suffer. And boy, in austerity many suffered.

It has to be a paper exercise because that’s the reality of it. It can’t be discussed in any other terms because at the end of the day, you have to balance the books - or at least try to.

Point being that we both borrowed and increased taxes throughout that period.

Lots of people lost their jobs and businesses. People were laid off and unemployment I think peaked at about 6%ish.

To have ensure the public sector emerged unscathed, there was only one way to do it. There was only one alternative to austerity, and this would have been to have raised taxes sharply or borrowed more. Borrowing is just kicking it down the road, because one day taxes need to be raised to pay for the borrowing, so borrowing is merely a proxy for tax - deferred tax.

Had we done the above, all it would have achieved is shovelling the misery entirely from the public to the private sector, which would have been abhorrently selfish.

This is why is has to be a paper exercise and not about anecdotal stories of woe. For every story, there’s another one. For every PS employee with no real terms pay rise, there’s a car home worker getting a tax rise to pay for the pay rise, should it occur.

The point being, calling a period of tax rises and higher borrowing to support the public sector’s survival austerity is strange, it’s essentially saying taxes were raised but they weren’t taxed hard enough, with no regard to the misery and poverty those tax rises would have caused others.