To be fair to the Labour Party the post about Luciana Berger isn’t balanced:

“She suffered constant harassment, intimidation, threats of physical violence, which were all brushed under the carpet and ignored by the leader’s office. ”

This would seem to imply that Luciana’s Berger’s treatment was reserved for her as a Labour MP. The reality is that harassment, intolerance, intimidation, threats and an unwillingness to debate on facts in a courteous manner isn’t just reserved for others on the left – it’s also dished out to literally anyone that has a different perspective or fails to say they agree with the “required” position.

At the last but one election our Labour MP made a great deal out of free speech whilst the local activists were spending most of their time abusing and harassing other candidates standing for election.

Their conduct extended to abusing the neighbours of the other candidates, telling the children of one candidate that the parent was a pedophile and screaming abuse at the other candidates as they went canvassing on doorsteps.

In one case residents had a load of momentum activists screaming abuse at the candidate on residents’ doorsteps – the activists were patently unaware of the judgement locals would make on them / their candidate because of their own behaviour.

The intolerance ***of some*** on the left is also clearly deemed acceptable by senior Labour leaders including Sir Kier – as evidenced by his inaction over one of his front bench calling a political opponent “Scum” in the House of Commons – which then resulted in the recipient and his family being called scum by local activists.

If Kier does anything (which seems unlikely based on past form) it should be to restore the norms of courteous discourse to the Labour Party. For a democracy to work well we need ideas to be tested and challenged in the interests of finding the best possible way forward – and part of that is listening to each other without immediately making value judgements and resorting to abuse and intimidation.

It’s pretty disappointing to see how recent events are now starting to detract from the very important focus on ending racism and inequality of opportunity.

It seems to me that a lot of the narrative in the UK is now coming from the same left wing activists / anti capitalists who have been pushing class war and seeking to stifle debate on a number of fronts – with the constant threat of public “shaming” for anyone that challenges them.

Many of the protesters don’t really seem to know why they are there and of those that do, their position seems conflicted by their own bias.

This video has been doing the rounds in oz – not sure if there’s anything similar for the U.K. but illustrates some of the inconsistencies.

My own view on Colston is that the statue should have been removed years ago.

Interestingly the chap who claimed he was was offended appears to himself have a bit of a problem with “white” people. Literally hundreds of messages on his twitter feed about whites / white men / white power.

Alistair Stewart also used the same quote against Extinction Rebellion – so it rather looks like the whole episode has been engineered by someone with their own agenda.

“Donate to a local NHS charity in lieu of the £350m a week they won’t be getting?“

The NHS budget is increasing £34b over the life of this parliament – which translates to £20.5 “real terms” increase and £394m a week extra.

“Monbiot has written some great stuff. I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s one of the decent journalists/authors with a moral compass.“

When “moral compass” includes reportedly retweeting entirely false child sex abuse allegations about someone and then naming them on Twitter.

The penalties for dropping litter need to be more meaningful – and fund resources to identify litter droppers.

My solution would be:

– £500 on the spot fine for one item + 10 hours of litter picking
– If they can’t pay then 50 hours of litter picking

And then a multiplier for more than one item and / or repeat offence

Aren’t the aisles a bit small to get a camper van round? Still, will make for a memorable holiday destination!

No doubt the usual voices will be along shortly to tell us why everything in the latest leak isn’t true:

“Precisely, is Avoidance the correct term?

the rules need to change to not allow tax to be paid in low tax havens for big companies trading in other countries“

Most of the largest U.K. headquartered PLCs derive the majority of their revenue (and hence profit) overseas. They can therefore legitimately choose to locate their HQ wherever it makes sense to do so – many choose London for access to City firms in particular, law.

Should they choose to domicile in Ireland they would not be “evading” anything but in almost every case shareholders would benefit from the reduction in corporation tax from the 26% Labour are proposing and the 12% that Ireland currently levies.

When most revenue / profit is derived overseas you can’t simply cry “tax haven” because other countries in Europe are more competitive on tax.

France: £66
Germany: £118
Belgium: £144
Spain: £108
Italy: £65
Britain: £381

Is this actually comparable though? How much is the cost per mile and to what extent are fares in Britain reflective of how long people commute?

To get to £381 a month you’re probably looking at a 50-60 mile rail journey – so around 0.16p a mile.

Edit: the headline figures probably don’t tell the whole story:

https://www.seat61.com/uk-europe-train-fares-comparison.html

“ Some good stuff from Corbyn today about the nature of patriotism and the reasons terrorists attack the UK”

Not really because it misses the obvious point that it’s not just U.K. citizens being blown up and stabbed on their own streets – it’s a worldwide phenomenon that includes countries that have had no role in any military engagements in the Middle East.

What Corbyn doesn’t like to talk about is that the indiscriminate murder we have again seen is ideological – you simply cannot have safety when thousands of people living in this country and so radicalised that their only motivation is to seek out opportunities to maximise the suffering of others e.g. deliberately targeting a concert that was mostly attended by young girls and women.

These same attacks also take place across the Muslim world and almost always are perpetrated on minority populations – that’s when they aren’t being enslaved or forced to suffer forced rape or being burnt in cages.

Corbyn has no perspective on this other than to call the leaders of these groups his “friends.”

The payout doesn’t seem enough to me.

On the legal fees point there was a teacher in the news a year or two ago – he had been forced into bankruptcy under the weight of £400k of legal fees defending himself against what were proven to be completely false and malicious claims of sexual assault. I think he also lost his marriage, home and access to his own children along the way – and even when he was proven innocent the coverage of the case meant he would never be able to work as a teacher again.

The consequences for false allegations need to be much bigger and it’s wrong that public servants like the leaders of the Met are allowed to remain in their jobs when they have failed so comprehensively.

Convert – you can just use a 12m sim only phone contract on vodafone. If you buy via fonehouse you can probably get a 12m deal for £18 a month after cash back.

Best to try Vodafone for 30 days first though – their network still isn’t great and download speeds can be an issue in the evening – less so on EE.

“ Its a concerted effort which has worked to some extent to equate anti isreal sentiment with anti Semitic.”

A more plausible explanation is that Labour has taken on many new members and activists who are anti-semites. They also have a healthy dose of candidates standing whose “heritage” communities are extremely prejudiced against Jews so they are deliberately playing to the gallery.

The basic three router isn’t great.

Best route to take is:

– buy a three unlimited sim for £20 a month (less if you via TopCashback and sign up for a year)

– buy a huawei router from amazon but make sure it has external antenna ports – cost £80 ish

– buy an external antenna and cable

With that you should have no problems getting 20-40Mbps (or higher – I’ve managed 140Mbps) downloads in most parts of the country.

This will work fine for most households but if you’re running apps or devices that require a constant upload e.g. home security cams you may get occasional connection problems.

The fair usage on Three’s plans (you can use a phone plan or a data plan) is 9999Gb a month.

“ Not that it will prevent nationalisation but it will make it harder to do it by paying a fair price rather than the market price.”

Hold on TJ – weren’t you telling us a few threads ago that Labour’s plans wouldn’t result in any companies or shareholders being out of pocket?

If the Labour loons will now be forced to pay fair market price for the things they take / steal, that will mean that shareholders (mostly held by pension funds – mostly impacting people not the toady old hedge funds etc) will now receive more than they would have done. Which is good.

Even this is bobbins though. The cost of nationalising the water industry alone is estimated at £160b – which equates to £5280 government debt per household. If they made water free for ten years people would still be out of pocket – and by the time the unions have got control water will be more expensive than it is now and we’ll also have to chip in for the capital investment required.

“actually Rob they are moving because of the tories disastrous hard brexit plan“

Yes they are so worried about the impact of not being in the EU that both companies have established new legal entities in non EU countries..

Companies have started moving the ownership of assets abroad – as reported in The Times today.

SSE and National Grid are complete (the former to Switzerland and the latter to Hong Kong and Luxembourg) with other energy companies having already set up new holding companies.

Expect to see most large companies (> 250 employees) follow in order to avoid Labour’s 10% company theft plan.

“Neither are those bloody glasses. Unless he’s got a wonky head won’t someone please straighten them…“

He’s reportedly got a fresnel lens in the right side which would suggest a recent mild stroke – they are typically used to correct double vision.

If that’s the case a vote for Labour is probably a vote for McDonnell as Prime Minister within 6 months – and the hardline Marxist agenda that goes with that.

Based on their latest round of policy announcements anyone who things we couldn’t get a worse leader than Corbyn may be about to be in for a big surprise – but not in the way they expect.

Could be fox poo (very likely if the house has pets inside – foxes seem to “punishment” poo in the scenario, or if you live in a city could be a junkie poo if the recent surge in drug addicts pooing in the middle of pavements is anything to go by…

“But the emphasis of profit is moved so the governments incentive is to provide a better service.“

A more likely outcome is that the drive to manage costs and effeciency is lost – not least when the unions get to decide how its run. And then it just costs a lot lot more with no focus at all on service.

Elon Musk will have deployed around 12k Starlink satellites by 2025, with a further 30,000 deployed on the decade after that.

Its low orbit means that starlink will be high bandwidth and low latency – offering almost universal coverage without any roads being dug up.

Labour are effectively offering to dig up the road outside ever household in the country and maintain it for £8 per household per year.

The realistic build cost is somewhere between £50-100b and the operating costs including depreciation will be somewhere around £5b a year. Most of the costs in the papers fail to account for depreciation of the assets.

Each £b of spend works out as tax of around £33 per household, so the build cost is between £1700 and £3400 per household and the operating costs is at least £150 a year on top of that.

They won’t raise anything significant from Facebook et al because it requires a coordinated change of global accounting standards and transfer pricing rules, and in the process they will have put many other network businesses into insolvency and many thousands of employees at Virgin, Sky, City Fibre etc etc on the dole.

Kelvin – that’s not what’s happening though is it?

There’s plenty being said on the positive benefits of immigration – access to skills and capacity that’s required for our economy to grow and deliver the services we need.

What’s also being said is that this needs to be done in a controlled way, not just for the benefit of people who are already here (including recent migrants) but also for those that have yet to come.

Given the unavoidable lead time in building infrastructure (housing, school buildings, hospitals) that in many cases have 5-10 year delivery times, and the need to recruit and train the additional staff to run them (4-7 years to train a teacher to competency, 8-15 years for specialist medics) etc etc, uncontrolled immigration just creates problems all round – which is why every country in the world has some form of control.

By contrast, Corbyn has committed to:

– easing freedom of movement further
– extending the automatic right for family members to join
– creating new automatic entitlements to very costly public services e.g. healthcare..

…And then branding anyone who can see the challenges this would create as racist.

If you take a good walk round most cities in Europe (including the U.K.) there are now serious issues with homelessness, worker exploitation and people living in poverty.

Accelerating the flow of people will simply make this worse – we MUST start to get ahead of these problems and we cannot do that if continue with the flow of 4-500k people (or more) entering the country each year, often with little or no notice and in many cases having immediate automatic entitlement to public services irrespective of whether they will every make a contribution to the running of those services.

To do this simply guarantees that poverty will increase for everyone and societal problems will continue to get worse – often impacting those that are already disadvantaged far more than it impacts the chattering classes.

Angela Rayner is unique as a potential education secretary – she’s the only one to literally have no exam passes in anything – having left school with no GCSEs above grade D.

She’s up their with Abbott on her grasp of numbers and we’re told these people are competent to run the country.

So let’s unpack Labour’s latest giveaway – nationalising BT and giving everyone free fibre broadband (ftth) by 2030.

How will it play out?

BT will start making plans to move its corporate HQ and the actual outcome will be:

– Corbyn tries to nationalise BT
– new home country of BT group says no
– the government loses all of the corporation tax
– the U.K. receives no more investment in telecoms
– no-one gets free fibre broadband.

Tomorrow every household will be promised its own Unicorn by 2030.

The reputation for German reliability is completely misplaced – our household experience has been:

– new Neff oven started cutting out after 13 months and required 3 x engineer visits
– Neff induction job blew on 1 side (2 zones) after 19 months
– Neff combo / microwave oven failed at 24 months and required 7 visits before it was fixed
– Neff dishwasher failed at 4 years – 5 x repairs and in the end we junked it and replaced it with a “more reliable”…
– Miele dishwasher – which failed the first time was used it

– we also replaced our boiler with a Vailant which failed the first night of winter it was on

Unsurprisingly our VW car has also had endless problems including cutting out whilst driving – we were told for 18 months that we were idiots and couldn’t drive and then a software update was released to fix the problem. The sunroof also leaked due to not having an annual “sunroof service” and required £500 of repairs. There are two other houses on the road with the same model and they’ve had the same problem as well.

In short I won’t touch anything from Germany again – it’s not just that the products are cr4p, it’s the sneering rude attitude of their retailers / distributors in the U.K. when something does go wrong.

It’s probably going to be a bad day for Labour.

One of their long serving MPs has just announced on Radio 4 that:

– he’s not going to stand for election
– Corbyn has poisoned the Labour Party with anti semitism
– Corbyn’s relationship border on being traitor to his own country and that he’s spent his whole career playing the role of an ally to corrupt regimes and terrorists
– John McDonnell is about the same
– Labour’s economic plans will ruin the country – Corbyn will “take every step possible to make the economy sick”
– People should vote for the Conservatives
– Boris Johnson is a more competent leader

“If you want another five years racing to the bottom “

When “racing to the bottom” now means:

– record unemployment
– the U.K. is number one in Europe in attracting inward investment
– c60% of the population now make no net contribution to the running of the state
– real (inflation adjusted) disposable household income has growth 10% in the last 7 years
– Income inequality has fallen compared to the last Labour govt
– wage growth has hit 2.9%
– the U.K. is one of a very few (2 or 3) countries to actually deliver on the 0.7% foreign aid commitment
– healthcare as a % of GDP remains higher than at any point under the last Labour government or any other government before that.
– the U.K. is one of a handful of countries that have committed to de-carbonising the economy by 2050.

There are undoubtedly many areas where more focus and investment is required but many countries would gladly take any of the above outcomes.

“I’m behind on this one…

But what could be the upside for the country? That has to be factored in.“

There are none:

– companies will relocate their HQs (leading to loss of some of the highest paying roles all of which pay the 45% tax band)
– anyone with a private pension (so not Corbyn or McDonnell with their £2m+ pension pots they have paid nowt towards) will lose 5% of their pension funds
– the government will lose £100b or more in corporation tax receipts – every year
– inward investment will dry up, leading to a compounding of the inevitable effect of Labour coming to power which is higher unemployment

Corbyn has played a blinder though – workers will vote for it because they think they will get £250 a year in shares when the reality is most will just lose their jobs.

“ Brexit of any kind will do far more damage than Labour’s tax increase, but that’s not stopping anyone.”

That’s very much debatable but what is certain is that if Labour follow through on their pledge to take / steal 10% of the value of all private companies with more than 250 staff the immediate effect will be:

1. All U.K. headquartered PLCs will love their HQ for tax purposes
2. The U.K. will lose all of the associated corporation tax
3. Foreign inward investment would cease
4. The country would £100B + worse off
5. The government would become embroiled in a series of international legal cases that would sink Whitehall for a decade or more.

Anyone who votes for Corbyn and McDonnell needs their head looking at.

Ed Milliband is playing to the fools gallery as much as his brother was when he criticised “fat cat overpaid bosses” – David’s now paid close to a million a year for running a charity.

The younger milliband brother knows perfectly well that long term reductions in corporation tax stimulate economic growth and job creation and ultimately lead to higher tax receipts for the government. At 19% our rate of corporation tax is still substantially higher than Ireland at 12.5% – it’s why Ireland continued to attract so much inward investment.

On the Jess Philips comments – weren’t we repeatedly told by Labour that dodgy foreign money had funded Brexit via Arron Banks – only for an investigation by the National Crime Agency to find there was zero evidence?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/24/no-evidence-leave-eu-and-arron-banks-broke-law-says-agency-brexit

Alani- Sadiq has been a disastrous mayor – running up a deficit of close to £1b on TfL after freezing fares even though TfL told him that to do so would result in capex cuts down the line… BUT I can’t find any reference for the story involving his wife – can you share the source?

Thanks!

“Cutting spending as they did meant reduced tax income and did nothing to re-balance the economy“

Sorry TJ but this is complete bobbins on the following counts:

1. Welfare spending rose from 2010 to date – it reached £484B last year. In the early years of the coalition, net payments to those on benefits actually rose faster than inflation – a period when the working population were typically receiving no pay risess.

2. The same is true for the NHS – spending has risen and continues to rise.

3. The majority of families now make no net contribution to the services they receive from the state – the “rich” 10% (those earning over £49k) now pay around 27% of all tax.

4. The economy grew – with a record number of jobs last year and showing earlier and stronger growth from 2010 than many other countries in Europe.

Interestingly, one of the economies that recovered quicker was that of Ireland – where the government implemented significant (up to 40%) cuts in public sector wages.

Lastly, the recent surveys on income inequality / Gino show that its narrowed in recent years and is now lower than it was under the last labour government.

“Can you provide a link for this, thanks. Unless you mean Tom Sleigh who tweeted similar and says they’re sympathetic to green peace rather than a member, isn’t a labour councillor“

Yes – it is Tom Sleigh. Rather than judge on a tweet and go straight to character assassination why not listen to what he said?

It’s on the LBC app – look under “catch up”, then find Andrew Pierce 7pm on Friday and scroll to 6 minutes 15 seconds in.

“Greenpeace say the protestors self-identified“

This doesn’t ring true. On the radio last night they had a Labour councillor from London who was on the same table as the Conservative MP. He explained that:

1) there appeared to be complete chaos for some time before the MP got up – with a lot of men and women suddenly entering the room screaming and shouting

2) he said he was actually quite scared on the seconds before the woman went past the table

3) he said that even as a GreenPeace supporter that he did not realise it was GreenPeace doing it

4) that when the MP got up he initially blocked the women who then tried to get past him anyway – she was very focussed on getting to the top table where the Chancellor was giving a speech with the Governor of the Bank of England sitting next to him.

So if a GreenPeace supported on the same place as the MP was scared and didn’t know what was going on it’s hardly a massive leap to assume the MP in the same space at the same time may have felt the same and reacted in a way that with hindsight was an over reaction but at that split second seemed right.

One can only imagine the uproar if he had bear hugged her from behind.

Given there would have been a number of people there with Close Protections Officers she was lucky that she wasn’t looking down the barrel of a gun.

Protesting in public space is fine but doing it en masse at a private event is different.

Looks like Aunty scored another politically partisan own goal last night.

Of the c7 questions put to the contenders for the next Prime Minster one came from a Corbyn supporting Labour Party activist (which they knew and didn’t reference) and one came from a Corbyn supporting Imam asking about whether “words have consequences”.

The latter is finding out the answer for himself having now been suspended from his Deputy Headteacher role now that anti-Semitic holocaust denying tweets have been uncovered – along with his entirely predictable views on women and rape.

“As for this evening’s ‘debate’; 5 midlle aged, middle class white blokes totally divorced from the real world.“

Yes, even that “white” Asian bloke.

In what way are they more divorced from reality than the current Labour front bench?

1 was adopted, 1 shared a bedroom with 3 brothers his parents were so skint, 2 went to comprehensives, 1 started his own business etc etc.

Compare this to Corbyn – born to a wealthy family, himself a multi millionaire, creates job swaps so his son can be employed in the commons whilst decrying nepotism, and the guy has never had a job anyone would recognise as “real” outside politics.

Cel-Fi works well for all uk networks – the more expensive model can be used with an external weatherproof aerial – in really bad areas it’s possible to rig up a 10m “mast” or fix the aerial to a tree and then run coax back from there – which for the vast majority of areas will give good 4g coverage assuming there’s enough bandwidth on the network e.g Vodafone you may get a strong signal but poor data speeds – with EE and three you’re more likely to get good signal and speeds as they have more masts in more places.

It’s also worth mentioning the gain difference between different boosters – Cel Fi is around 100db whereas the plug in femtocells (connecting to broadband) will be a lot lower than that I.e. femto is best suited to smaller houses or properties that don’t have solid walls internally.

https://www.discountcomms.co.uk/acatalog/Mobile_Phone_GSM_Signal_Boosters_UK1.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxba79s3w4gIVq53tCh2zgwjnEAAYASAAEgJE-vD_BwE