Tory Cabinet Thread

[Rushies tash]

6 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Well it could be a case of spending 2 or 3 years derailing every interveiw with media bias ie the amount of foreign billionaires owning the printed press and the amount of tories at the top of the BBC. Just mention it in almost every speech . Plus just bang on and on about who made the health service.

Barry Gardiner used to be great at calling this out, but he's been jibbed off along with anyone else who might rock the boat.

[Gnasher]

1 hour ago, Rushies tash said:

Barry Gardiner used to be great at calling this out, but he's been jibbed off along with anyone else who might rock the boat.

Yeah he did. I'm not sure trying to placate the MSM is going to work with anyone from the left, I think things can be learnt from Trump, ie just fucking lamblast it, deride it and mock it. Make the media owned billionairea seem out of touch with the man on the street, which they are. 

 

A simple start would be questioning why shows like Marr keep doing paper reviews when owners do not pay tax or reside in this country and keep calling out the bbc for it. They dont include the morning star, ask why not?

[Rushies tash]

38 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Yeah he did. I'm not sure trying to placate the MSM is going to work with anyone from the left, I think things can be learnt from Trump, ie just fucking lamblast it, deride it and mock it. Make the media owned billionairea seem out of touch with the man on the street, which they are. 

 

A simple start would be questioning why shows like Marr keep doing paper reviews when owners do not pay tax or reside in this country and keep calling out the bbc for it. They dont include the morning star, ask why not?

You're preaching to the converted mate. None of that will happen.

[Scooby Dudek]

41 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Yeah he did. I'm not sure trying to placate the MSM is going to work with anyone from the left, I think things can be learnt from Trump, ie just fucking lamblast it, deride it and mock it. Make the media owned billionairea seem out of touch with the man on the street, which they are. 

 

A simple start would be questioning why shows like Marr keep doing paper reviews when owners do not pay tax or reside in this country and keep calling out the bbc for it. They dont include the morning star, ask why not?

People point out the selling figures for papers are decreasing, so how can they have as much influence ?

I remember reading an article, basically saying they have the front pages read (reviewed) on Sky news, twice and on BBC news at least twice. Also on Marr, so whilst their readership is decreasing there message is still being given to millions. 

They also, very helpfully on Sky point out which papers don't support the Tories, never doing the same for anti Labour propaganda. 

 

It is bias, they know it is bias but are happy to go along with it. Also shown when the reviewers they have on are normally right wing proponents, giving their impartial opinions.

 

It should be called out, but obviously can't upset people.

 

Controlled opposition.

[Bobby Hundreds]

I genuinely detest this party.

[Captain Howdy]

Surprised with the budget, expected much worse I have to say.

[Bobby Hundreds]

1 minute ago, Captain Howdy said:

Surprised with the budget, expected much worse I have to say.

All achievable because of their fantastic governing over the last 10 years apparently. 

[Bruce Spanner]

32 minutes ago, Captain Howdy said:

Surprised with the budget, expected much worse I have to say.

Worse personally, or worse society, as it did fuck all for me personally, apart from increase my Council Tax, and did the square root of fuck all for society apart from kicking unemployment down the road for a while longer. 

 

We are a point where we need vision and we get real term cuts, to wages and government departments, and a promise to tax business (profit) in line with the rest of the developed world at some point in the future, but don’t worry ‘free ports’, which will do the absoultely fuck all for me and you, in fact they’ll probably leave use worse off in th elong term, but the rich will be getting paid, so that's alright.

 

No words about jobs, green, progress economies.

 

No vision about where we can boost the economy in the long term, for example 95% mortgages when interest is at its lowest will bring long term problems of negative equity. 

 

This was the very definition of an empty suit saying empty things to empty heads.

 

Sunak friends are safe though, no income tax hikes on higher earners, no attack on non domiciled or tax evaders/avoiders. Nice and safe for those who really need to pay up. No attempt to reign bonus in with taxation. All manner of simple fixes could recoup fortunes and still leave them astronomically wealthy, yet nothing. Birds of a feather an all that.

 

Literally nothing has changed when it desperately needed to.

[Anubis]

Listened to him as I was out in the car at the time. Turned it into a party political broadcast and couldn’t help but have a snide dig at the EU. Could have been worse but still let the Big Boys off the hook. After it some of the texts to 5 Live - fucking doffers going on about Starmer and magic money trees. 

[Captain Howdy]

It’s a Tory Govt, like I say, I’ve seen worse, far worse.

[Anubis]

It’s getting to the point that I’d happily ride through this country on a tauntaun, using a lightsaber to cut down fucking doffers. Starting with anyone who has a picture of the Queen, any other member of the royals, Maggie Thatcher, or any other Tory politician on their mantelpiece. So that’s Hermes shitting it...

[magicrat]

12 hours ago, Gnasher said:

It gets worse. The lady renovating the flat is called Lulu Lytle and shes a celebrity eco designer...

 

https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/carrie-symonds-lulu-lytle-soane-number-11-redecorate-makeover-b921766.html

 

Her fabric prices start at £100 per meter.

Lulu fucking Lytle , Jesus wept . Sounds like a character out an Enid Blyton book.  She needs to fuck off and get a proper job the pretentious cunt. 

[Moo]

48 minutes ago, Captain Howdy said:

It’s a Tory Govt, like I say, I’ve seen worse, far worse.

I know what you mean I suppose, but that depends how they're being judged.  If you take their current social and economic policies, to an extent you've seen worse (maybe even far worse).  But there has never been worse for subverting democracy, corruption, and divisiveness.  The country is in an absolute mess morally and politically and long term that's very damaging and very hard to see a way out of.  Not to mention what's around the corner with the mess of Brexit, and the future of the NHS.  All because of these Tories.

[Kevin D]

So Starmer really reckons Sunak is going to be PM soon.

[Bruce Spanner]

2 minutes ago, Kevin D said:

So Starmer really reckons Sunak is going to be PM soon.

I certainly got that feeling.

[sir roger]

Johnaon looked like he had rolled in full of meths and decided to have a kip on a bench.

[Bobby Hundreds]

People I've spoken too are happy to pay a bit more tax to solve issues. Weird when people with more money than they can possibly spend are desperate to pay less.

[Bruce Spanner]

The analysis is in and it’s as thought, people will become worse off before the tax increase really kick in when they’ll be royally screwed.

 

If interest rates and inflation rises a lot more people will slip in to poverty, in a high anxiety jobs market.

 

No investment in infrastructure to generate or protect, real term cuts, and big ones realistically.

Austerity by stealth on public services.

 

Smoke and mirrors, he’s being pulled apart and quite tightly!

 

They had the opportunity and will to set the UK up to protect it from the worse, but failed and failed badly. Sunak is a busted flush, it would seem.

 

The imminent danger … to the budget is Labour or some enterprising journalist finding a George Osborne-style blooper and derailing the whole thing by the weekend. Keir Starmer reckons he’s got it — just before this email was sent out the opposition accused Sunak of burying a £30 billion cut to day-to-day spending in the Department of Health and Social Care. NHS England core resource spending — which includes COVID spending — will fall from £147.7 billion this year to £139.1 billion next year, Labour says, despite new analysis suggesting patient waiting lists have hit a record high. This is Labour’s main attack line today — Starmer is on a visit to a hospital in Derby this morning to try to make it land.

 

Also worth noting … that social care barely got a mention yesterday. Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt tweeted: “Little hope for social care sector bruised and demoralised after most devastating year in its history. Understand money is difficult to commit at this stage, but they desperately need to know a plan is coming.”

 

SCRAPING THE PORK BARREL: Another strong prospect for Labour is the extraordinary coincidence that Sunak’s two funds helping towns and communities across England just happen to overwhelmingly benefit Tory-held seats. The “Levelling Up Fund” will give cash to Sunak’s own relatively affluent Richmond seat in Yorkshire, and prioritizes it over places like Barnsley despite the fact Richmond is only No. 251 out of 317 on the government’s own index of deprivation. HuffPo’sArj Singh has the stats, which look pretty bad, to put it mildly.

 

Uh oh: The Treasury tells Singh that Sunak had no sight of the specific areas that would be deemed high priority for the fund, but ministers were able to see a provisional map showing how the cash would be spread under the categories. A Treasury source insists to Playbook: “Ministers didn’t see list of places before signing off on methodology. So the idea they’ve picked Tory seats is ridiculous.”

 

But just look at the numbers: Forty of 45 towns in Sunak’s “Towns Fund” were represented by Tory MPs. As the Times’ George Grylls writes in a damning thread, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick’s Newark seat has received the maximum amount it could from the towns fund — and despite now denying he had anything to do with the decision, in a video from the 2019 election campaign Jenrick boasted: “I helped to secure a £25 million town deal which I hope will improve the public realm and make the town center a more attractive place to spend time in.”

 

Now watch: If you’re wondering whether this murkiness is going to be tricky to explain, watch the FT’s George Parker skewer Sunak with the evidence yesterday here.

 

Not to mention … that Sunak overruled his officials to put the new Treasury campus in Darlington, which is next door to his constituency. The FT’sSeb Payne reports: “Senior Whitehall officials argued that larger northern cities such as Newcastle or Leeds had better jobs markets and infrastructure that would make the relocation more sustainable. Ultimately, the politics triumphed.”

 

Is there a Teeside election soon? Payne has a scoop that Teeside — which controversially beat Tyneside to freeport status yesterday — is also getting a new wind turbine factory creating 1,000 jobs. Local Mayor Ben Houchen must not be able to believe his luck as he comes up for reelection in, yep, two months. Subtle. The Chronicle gives Sunak a battering with its story: “Chancellor under fire for pouring money into Teesside but ignoring rest of North East.”

 

ALL YOUR BEST BUDGET ANALYSIS: As ever the day after budget day, it’s probably worth reading most of the FT this morning. The pink ‘un’s Economics Editor Chris Giles identifies a key area to watch: “The Budget documents showed a stealthy £4 billion a year cut in spending alongside the tax rises,” which drives a coach and horses through the Johnson administration’s vow to end austerity. The Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell says Sunak will inevitably end up spending more than that, leading to likely even greater tax rises down the track. Expect lots of questions to the chancellor asking him to rule out various future tax hikes, and expect him to refuse to answer.

 

Prepare for pain: Times Economics Editor Philip Aldrick offers a sobering view that Sunak’s planned tax rises are “not enough” and that he “said that he needed to be ‘honest’ about the public finances, but he was not honest enough.” Aldrick warns: “Further tax rises and spending cuts look inevitable if Sunak is to stabilise debt. A £12.7 billion package for the self-employed appeared to be a down-payment for future tax rises. An online sales tax is on the cards. Alternatively, Britain could super-charge growth. But there was precious little in the budget to generate the higher productivity to deliver that.”

 

Or a pre-election giveaway? Former Osborne aide Rupert Harrison is slightly less pessimistic in the same paper, writing: “If growth disappoints, or if what are still tight day-to-day spending totals for government departments prove difficult to enforce, he may need to come back for more. But if the recovery is strong, he may even be able to give some of that money back before the next election.”

 

Very optimistic scenario: Conservative Home’sPaul Goodman arrives at a similar position, suggesting growth could well end up being far better than the OBR’s forecasts — even to the point that Sunak could cancel many of his planned tax rises, offer tax cuts or a splurge on public services, allowing Johnson to call a snap election in 2023. That might be getting a bit excited, but Goodman is not alone in thinking Sunak framed the budget around the next election. In his analysis of yesterday, the FT’s George Parker says the vaccine rollout “has shifted the political and economic mood,” allowing the Tories to lay the groundwork for their battle with Labour over the coming years. A concerned shadow Cabinet minister tells Parker: “It looks like they are going to get away with it.”

 

Causes for concern: There are two main reasons why others in the Tory party are a lot less positive: tax rises and interest rates. In the Telegraph, a furious Allister Heath castigates Johnson and Sunak for “trashing Thatcherism and embracing Europe’s politics of decline.” Heath says the “avoidably bad budget will haunt the Tories for years to come” as “Britain will continue its shift to the Left on economics, sinking ever-deeper into a social-democratic, low growth, European-style model: our choice will be between a high tax and a very high tax party. Labour will be emboldened.”

Making Britain Biden-proof: In this week’s Spectator cover story, Kate Andrews says Sunak’s true motivation for the budget is his fear of “an inflation resurgence that could crush Britain’s economic recovery and follow the pandemic with a financial crisis.” Andrews hears Sunak is “terrified” of a small uptick in interest rates costing the U.K. billions, and that U.S. President Joe Biden’s vast stimulus package “is causing real concern in Downing Street” due to the inflation risk. “Sunak wants to make Britain Biden-proof,” Andrews says.

 

Now read this: The budget did little to bring down emissions or address the hard parts of climate policy, writes POLITICO’s Senior Climate Correspondent Karl Mathiesen in this analysis of the climate elements of the budget. And POLITICO’s Anna Isaac writes that the budget showed that COVID-19 is a big enough economic hole to hide Brexit in. Finally, the POLITICO team compares the U.K.’s coronavirus crisis support for the economy with the Continent’s in this top read.

[Bobby Hundreds]

I watched a video on the budget with experts discussing it and one guy said he was surprised by the big increase to corporation tax from 19 percent to 25 percent but corporation tax being incredible easy to avoid paying and them having plenty of notice to get their shit together that it's merely just going to be a political point scoring exercise for the tories without any real benefit, like them relabelling the minimum wage as a living wage and then boasting they introduced a living wage and the fuckibg detestable media and "journalists" went along with it. I'm not arsed about increasing corporation tax just make them pay what their supposed to be the bastard tories and people like Sunak and his wife use the loopholes.

[Bruce Spanner]

7 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I watched a video on the budget with experts discussing it and one guy said he was surprised by the big increase to corporation tax from 19 percent to 25 percent but corporation tax being incredible easy to avoid paying and them having plenty of notice to get their shit together that it's merely just going to be a political point scoring exercise for the tories without any real benefit, like them relabelling the minimum wage as a living wage and then boasting they introduced a living wage and the fuckibg detestable media and "journalists" went along with it. I'm not arsed about increasing corporation tax just make them pay what their supposed to be the bastard tories and people like Sunak and his wife use the loopholes.

 

You only pay tax on 'profits' so raise operational costs, buy lots of overseas 'expertise & consultancy' bought from a shell company/subsidiary in a tax haven and you've reduced your profit whilst saving your money and limiting your exposure to taxation, even I know how it works and I'm not the fucking chancellor.

[Bjornebye]

3 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I watched a video on the budget with experts discussing it and one guy said he was surprised by the big increase to corporation tax from 19 percent to 25 percent but corporation tax being incredible easy to avoid paying and them having plenty of notice to get their shit together that it's merely just going to be a political point scoring exercise for the tories without any real benefit, like them relabelling the minimum wage as a living wage and then boasting they introduced a living wage and the fuckibg detestable media and "journalists" went along with it. I'm not arsed about increasing corporation tax just make them pay what their supposed to be the bastard tories and people like Sunak and his wife use the loopholes.

The people who will suffer from a rise in corporation tax will be the workers and it wont start from the top of the food chain either. 'Corporation' is just a piece of paper in companies house isn't it? 

[Mudface]

Worst Home Secretary ever. The government have paid out a substantial sum of taxpayers' money to avoid going to court. In contrast to the Sturgeon/ Salmond story, expect the BBC to quietly shelve it without any investigation.

 

 

 

[Anubis]

From The Grauniad website.

 

Rishi Sunak barely mentioned the NHS in his budget. So what’s the issue?

Labour claims the chancellor has quietly cut the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) budget for 2021-22 by £30.1bn. Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said: “Rishi Sunak promised to be ‘open and honest’ with the British public. But buried in the small print of his budget is a cut to frontline NHS services that will increase pressure on staff and do nothing for patients stuck on growing waiting lists.”

 

Is Ashworth right?

No. The reduction in the DHSC’s budget only relates to the extra costs it and the NHS in England have incurred from tackling the Covid-19 pandemic over the last year. That has involved spending billions on personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff and £22bn on the government’s test-and-trace programme, which has performed poorly. Importantly, despite Ashworth’s claim, the budget cut does not relate to frontline NHS services such as A&E care, diagnostic tests, surgery and outpatient appointments.

What are the sums of money involved here?

The Treasury gave the DHSC an extra £58.9bn in emergency additional funding this year to cover the huge extra costs resulting from the pandemic, which took its total budget for this year up to £199.2bn. However, in the new year starting on 1 April, Matt Hancock’s department will receive just £22bn over and above its core budget for Covid expenses. That means its overall budget will fall to £169.1bn.

Ashworth depicts the difference between those two sums as a £30.1bn “cut to frontline NHS services”. It is not, though. The extra £58.9bn was exceptional, and by definition temporary, funding. It was never meant to be permanent. With the pandemic receding for now, and a huge stockpile of PPE stored in warehouses, the DHSC is receiving much less this year than last from the Treasury.

So what is happening to the money the DHSC receives to fund normal NHS services?

This involves what in Whitehall speak is called the DHSC’s “resource departmental expenditure level (DEL or RDEL)”. It is actually going up, from £140.3bn this year to £147.1bn – an increase of £6.8bn.

But many NHS organisations are unhappy about the budget. Why is that?

The NHS Confederation (hospital trust bosses), British Medical Association (doctors) and the Health Foundation thinktank say the NHS in England needs at least £10bn more in 2021-22 to meet the extra costs Covid has caused, notably a big backlog of surgery and extra demand for mental health care. Sunak gave the service £3bn more in 2021-22 for those things in his autumn statement last November. But the confederation says that is “not enough”. They point to the fact that 4.5 million people are waiting to have treatment in hospital such as an operation – the highest number on record – and that it is estimated up to 10 million people, or almost 20% of England’s population, will need either new or extra mental health support as a direct result of the pandemic.

[Bjornebye]

No NHS pay-rise? Started his speech off praising the work of the NHS over the last year. 

[Mudface]

Fuck 'em, they can cash in on the claps.