Sir! Keir! Starmer!

Here we see a typical farmer taking a calf to market:

Here’s another one (James Dyson this time):

And his spare jet, in case the calf makes the other one a bit messy:

In the UK, 7.1 million adults read at, or below, the level of an average 9 year old

I can think of one family member that applies to. In their case, a legacy of undiagnosed dyslexia.

A low reading age doesn’t make somebody stupid.

The right wing mouth pieces have really taken on-board Bannon’s famous quote “Flood the zone with shit” haven’t they?

I can think of one family member that applies to. In their case, a legacy of undiagnosed dyslexia.

A low reading age doesn’t make somebody stupid.

It doesn’t. But at the level of a population of 65 million it has to be indicative. As well you know. But don’t like to acknowledge.

Again. I feel the need to shrug.

A low reading age doesn’t make somebody stupid.

Not it doesn’t…but that’s Almost a different subject… We don’t have low literacy levels because of dyslexia! we have low literacy levels across the population, dyslexic or otherwise. See also: critical thinking skills.

just look at the USA… Poor education is great for bad governments… Keep people angry and uneducated, and fed wave after wave of bull crap! and you can manipulate them as you please.

It doesn’t. But at the level of a population of 65 million it has to be indicative. As well you know. But don’t like to acknowledge.

Indicative of what?

Indicative of what?

Poor education standards and lack of parental/societal ambition, I’d suggest.

Also worth pointing out that with the right support and techniques, many dyslexics read at a higher standard anyway.

“keep ’em young, dumb, and full of cum”

It’s the american dream, baby!

Indicative of what?

Poor education standards and lack of parental/societal ambition, I’d suggest.

Also worth pointing out that with the right support and techniques, many dyslexics read at a higher standard anyway.

All of this.

All of this.

Oh right. Not stupid, then.

So the Labour government has just announced it is going to put loads more money and emphasis onto metal health services?

The bastards!

Will nobody think of the multimillionaire landowners?!

…emphasis onto metal health services?

Did they have to steel themselves for that?

The bastards!

Ironic that they’re so easily lead

Oh right. Not stupid, then.

Call it what you like. Excuse it how you like.

Everyone knows what it is.

So the Labour government has just announced it is going to put loads more money and emphasis onto metal health services?

The bastards!

So did the Tories and they were still bastards.

By the way where is this announcement. I’ve not seen it. Are we talking about stuff from the budget?

We always welcome some good stuff but they’ve made a hash of just about everything so far, so it’s going to take a big turn of events  to even remotely make any sort of difference to material conditions to say – poor people.

The future is BlackRock.

So the Labour government has just announced it is going to put loads more money and emphasis onto metal health services?

I suppose 4 shit/stupid things for every 1 good one (in theory) is an improvement. Still struggling to imagine what would have been different if the LibDems had won but that is what you wanted I suppose so at least you are happy, well done you.

Current macro-economic check:

The governor of the BoE (who has a history degree) is stubbornly talking down interest rate cuts (political) and driving unemployment . Kendall at exactly the same time has a knife in the back of every feckless layabout to get back to work – you bastards.

A financial institution owned by the government dictating policy? In the opposite direction.

And, our equally well-qualified Chancellor is about to impose minimum wage uptick and NI uptick (April) in a desolate economic landscape against virtually no growth. (Neither I would be against if fiscal flows from the government were high.  But the NI increase is just farcical.)

But don’t worry because private equity has got our back.

These are very drunk Centrists (being kind) driving this bus.  The staggering thing about Centrists is their inablity to see where they are going to make an absolute mess of things despite it all being in front of them in big magnetic letters.

Coming to power and screaming about mystical black holes and milking clothes donations was a seriously bad way to wipe the slate clean and improve people’s lives. But the budget was a whole new level of dumb. (For the record sod the land-owners but you have to give people something to get excited about to off-set this agro.)

Well that’s it, then.

Might as well let Farage have a go.

I suppose we could say  all farmers aren’t millionaire  tax avoiders but all millionaire tax avoiders are farmers then  🙂

I think that was one of Clarksons best early top gear reviews actually where he attempted to use a Ferrari for everyday use and was one of the things that got his career going as opposed to the usual this Maestro can take 2 suitcases in the back reviews.

The shift of top gear from boringly informative to entertainment.

Well that’s it, then.

Might as well let Farage have a go.

Labour have the power to change material conditions to avert that.

The fact they didn’t thake that plunge and misreprestend the government finances for politcal gain (didn’t work)  is on their inability to understand what feeds populism.

It’s just so so stupid.

Coming to power and screaming about mystical black holes and milking clothes donations was a seriously bad way to wipe the slate clean and improve people’s lives.

I think they’ve actually made their lives harder, the black hole and the nicking the poor pensioners winter allowance whilst the injustice of inheritance tax on the poor farmers.

Unless they pull a f… great white rabbit out of the hat before election time they’re likely to be history as they have given emotive ammunition to the other sides.

They now have to overachieve to counteract that.

I think they’ve actually made their lives harder, the black hole and the nicking the poor pensioners winter allowance whilst the injustice of inheritance tax on the poor farmers.

Absolutely. Polls have born this out with most foolish honeymoon in politics I’ve seen.

Total mis-steps and not needed. Don’t need political games when in power as such – just change stuff for the better.

The right wing mouth pieces have really taken on-board Bannon’s famous quote “Flood the zone with shit” haven’t they?

Because it works 🙂

Brexit proved it, micro targeting and flooding misinformation thru social media or any media works.

You can’t fight it with the truth as people only want to hear their own truths.

Well, if Labour are so bad, it is only four and a half years. Someone else can have a go after that.

That someone else either being the Tories or a Tory-Reform coalition.

TBH they now have easy wins,drop IHT tax for everyone and give the pensioners a bung at wintertime and promote helping to support the NHS out by having private  health insurance 🙂

Well, if Labour are so bad, it is only four and a half years. Someone else can have a go after that.

You realise you can be critical of Labour without wanting the tories back don’t you.  If you are 100% happy with Starmer government then great, some of us are not and are expressing it.

The fact they didn’t thake that plunge and misreprestend the government finances for politcal gain (didn’t work)  is on their inability to understand what feeds populism.

Folk who are ‘persuaded’ by populism have on the whole short memories, Labour don’t need to aim for these folk until the year before the next election.  The ‘baseline’ needs sorting AKA ‘inequality’, and IMO that’s what they should be doing for the next 3 years.

Well, if Labour are so bad, it is only four and a half years. Someone else can have a go after that.

That someone else either being the Tories or a Tory-Reform coalition.

So you are starting to understand the problem? A More in Common poll last week put Labour’s level of support at 25%, which is as bad as the level of support for the Tories  when Liz Truss prime minister.

However Reform UK are polling high which means that the Tory lead is only 3%, but the combined Tory-Reform share of the vote is 48% so under the current conditions a Tory-Reform coalition is perfectly feasible.

In less than five months the Labour government has become deeply unpopular, the reason for this is because they started off from a very low point – the smallest share of the vote of any governing party in living memory.

To win a second term Labour have their work cut out, in the next four years or so they will need to change people’s lives in a positive and noticeable way. All the doom and gloom and talk of “tough decisions” isn’t going to cut the mustard, otherwise support wouldn’t now be slumping.

Most governments put up taxes when they start out. It’s been seen time and time again .

The hard or unpopular decisions are often taken early whilst they have the huge majority. Again this is not new.

The difference being for this government that the expectation levels are that they now knuckle down and deliver the better country they said they could provide. In 3-4 years from now we can judge them. It’s still too early

Call it what you like. Excuse it how you like.

Everyone knows what it is.

Do they? I don’t think I do. What do you think it is?

Todays Torygraph reporting yet more heart-wrenching tales of the poverty inflicted on the rural poor by these monsters…

This isn’t Kier, but as this is about current govt, it may as well go here…

The NAO has refused to sign off the audit for local councils. The Govts entire public financial accounts are not fit for purpose. This farce can be traced all the way back to a decision made by Eric Pickles in 2015 when he tried to open up the auditing of these records to private enterprise, and it failed, meaning that loads of councils haven’t provided audited accts for years. This is the same Eric Pickles that signed off the Grenfell tower recladding and then warned the subsequent inquiry both to “not to waste his time” and then fail to accurately recall the number of deaths…

You would’ve thought that a man with such a stellar record would scuttle of to obscurity, but no, He was elevated by Theresa May and sits in the Lords…Rewards for failure

I’m not surprised by the reaction to the new Labour Gov, it was inevitable. ‘The Papers’ which for some reason a lot more people than actually buy them, listen to, are politically opposed to Labour. If they did nothing, they’d be ‘sitting on their arse’ if they do anything it’ll whipped up into a frenzy of misinformation and bile.

Being a stoic as I can (I’m a centrist, feel free to shout). When the current Government came to power, the UK was, and is, in a shit state. Public Services are on their arse, inflation too high, national debt record breaking, growth slow, public confidence low, public anger high.

I don’t recall Labour ever saying “Vote for us, it’s all sunlit uplands, we’ll cut crime, reduce inflation, everyone will own their own home, 1% base rate, 5% income tax and we’ll do it all by the end of the week”. They took stick at the time because a lot of people felt their offering was simply “look at the state of things, we can do better” or “Tory bashing” but what else could they offer? They tempered every wild idea of overnight change they could.

So they’re in charge now, I think anyone who’s halfway sensible would agree there were no easy options. Truss tried the full capitalist method, slash taxes, let growth fix everything and reality tore those idealisms to shreds immediately. They need to raise taxation, Sunak gave away billions in NI cuts to try to buy an election, when we just couldn’t afford it. Who’s paying this time? Pensioners who have decent pensions (shit), Employers (shit) and Wealthy Landowners (not shit perhaps, but badly communicated) buying farmland, or just land and calling it a farm has been a tax dodge since 1992. Yes I’m sure some family farmers who own large farms will suffer, but you might argue they’re only suffering because farm land value has shot up way past the point it’s a viable thing to buy just to farm, because of the people who buy up massive amounts of land to avoid inheritance tax, not to mention the subsidies the EU used to hand them just to sit on it.

So 2m have signed a petition to rerun the GE, sounds bad, but as we know, these things have a habit of becoming viral once they reach the media. 5 months ago 6.8m people voted Tory, they presumably watched the news and witnessed the state of the UK where they live and said “Yep, another 5 years and they’ll have this sorted” 3.6m voted Lib Dem, 4.1m voted Reform. You’ve got to assume it wouldn’t be hard to find 2m out of those 14m people who didn’t get the Government they wanted to hit a few key strokes to say they’re not happy. Especially when it’s been so widely publicised.

When the next GE campaigns kick off in about 4 years, we’ll know how well this current Government have done with the issues they took on, how they’ve delt with the ones we don’t yet know about and we can all decide whether we think they’ve done a good job, and how much we trust them to have another 5 years.

I always thought that Pickles career ended in disgrace for historic sex offences. Was that someone else and I’m misremembering?

Was that someone else and I’m misremembering?

Yup. Not aware of any accusations against him and he retired as an MP into the house of lords.

When the next GE campaigns kick off in about 4 years, we’ll know how well this current Government have done with the issues they took on, how they’ve delt with the ones we don’t yet know about and we can all decide whether we think they’ve done a good job, and how much we trust them to have another 5 years.

Yup, that is exactly how the system works. Unfortunately it is impossible to predict the outcome. Although right now it is looking fairly good for Nigel Farage……lots of positive stuff for him both domestically and internationally – ironically particularly across the Channel in Europe.

I cannot think of a time when the stakes were higher than they are likely to be in 2029, with the real possibility of Deputy Prime Minister Farage and Reform UK in the Cabinet. What Cabinet post for Lee Anderson….. Home Secretary?

They need to raise taxation, Sunak gave away billions in NI cuts to try to buy an election, when we just couldn’t afford it. Who’s paying this time?

Total nonsense.

They do need to raise taxation but not to pay for anything.

These are Tory lies repeated over and over until every Centrist sucks them in hook, like and centre.

We have a government with a huge capacity to spend, and along with the political will and urgency – it’s desperate.

The Labour party are failing this task.

Never ever forget the government spent 450bn pounds between 20/21 when the economy was more or less shutdown.

Can you not see we are going round and round with tax and spend. It doesn’t work – it’s an ever decreasing pot of money unless new money is created – all normal process between the BoE and government.

Tax and spend, balancing books and black-holes are the architects of austerity politics.  More to the point they’re all lies – bigger lies than Brexit.

There is no appetite for big taxation either – it doesn’t work as a function of spending. Taxation needs separating from spending completely.

To get out of this mess the government just has to do the right thing and stop pretending that it doesn’t have the fiscal fire power do it.

It’s on Labour to sort this out.

Everything else is Tory lies driven by Starmer and Reeves’s lack of understanding of the wider economy.

It seems to me some people would rather have a failing Labour economy than hold them to account.

I’d be surprised if they make five years in this state.

Tax and spend is required. That isn’t a “Tory lie”. And it doesn’t mean that it’s the tax taken that funds the spending. The government is spending more than it takes in as tax, and that gap is going to increase in the next few years. But if it decided to spend that much more without taxing some more, we’d all feel the consequences very quickly.

If every attempt to increase taxation, and shift who is paying tax towards the better off, is met with hyperbolic “Tory lies” complaints, then that narrative is only going to help the “small state” and “protect the rich from taxation” libertarians that’ll be chomping at the bit to take hold of public policy in the UK.

I fear many on the left have given up on the idea of redistribution of wealth and, after reading The Deficit Myth (and ONLY The Deficit Myth) have decided that the solution to everything is to print money.

I’d say a much better idea is to take the money off the super-rich and give it to people who have to choose between heating and eating.

IF Stephanie Kelton’s ideas hold water then I’d argue it only applies to the US which has the luxury of controlling the world’s global reserve currency.

Ultimately the world has ONE currency issuer and it is not the UK government.  Even if a country prints it’s own currency, it is still always going to be a currency user.

One other thing about Farage. He will most likely have had 4 years of high profile media coverage looking statesmanlike (as much as a perma-tanned conman ever could) talking to Trump. Supposedly on behalf of Britain.

The government will make the necessary noises about representatives of an elected government. Trump will ignore them and Farage will become the UK’s dedicated foreign secretary to the US by proxy. Because, ultimately, what can the UK do about it? It’ll play brilliantly to the MAGA mouthbreathers too – standing up to a supposedly decadent former empire who have gone soft and elected commies.

We’re hardly going to withdraw our diplomats.