Liz fucking Truss then.....

[Sugar Ape]

The mad thing is, the purported reason they won’t release the OBR forecast until November is to give them a chance to announce their supply side reforms that are supposed to show the market that they have a serious plan and everything will work out ok. 
 

But look at what areas they are looking to reform and they’ve got no chance of getting them all through parliament. Johnson briefed multiple times he was going to change planning rules to make it easier to build and had to back down every time after it became clear a load of his MPs would vote it down. And he had (initially) a lot more goodwill with his party than Truss has. 

 

Immigration she won’t get through since she wants to make it easier for struggling sectors to recruit from abroad. ERG will vote that down. Even stuff like moving the working time directive and the limits on the amount of children childcare workers can look after will be controversial and put pressure on Tories not to pass it. 
 

No chance the Tories vote all these things through and also vote through the 45pc tax  rate cut and the cut to benefits. Enough of them know it’ll be absolutely suicidal to be associated with this when they come to campaign to be elected again. 
 

 

[Gnasher]

5 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

The mad thing is, the purported reason they won’t release the OBR forecast until November is to give them a chance to announce their supply side reforms that are supposed to show the market that they have a serious plan and everything will work out ok. 
 

But look at what areas they are looking to reform and they’ve got no chance of getting them all through parliament. Johnson briefed multiple times he was going to change planning rules to make it easier to build and had to back down every time after it became clear a load of his MPs would vote it down. And he had (initially) a lot more goodwill with his party than Truss has. 

 

Immigration she won’t get through since she wants to make it easier for struggling sectors to recruit from abroad. ERG will vote that down. Even stuff like moving the working time directive and the limits on the amount of children childcare workers can look after will be controversial and put pressure on Tories not to pass it. 
 

No chance the Tories vote all these things through and also vote through the 45pc tax  rate cut and the cut to benefits. Enough of them know it’ll be absolutely suicidal to be associated with this when they come to campaign to be elected again. 
 

 

I thought the delay was so the dire findings would get lost in the fog of the new measures.

[Sugar Ape]

 

[Barrington Womble]

46 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

The mad thing is, the purported reason they won’t release the OBR forecast until November is to give them a chance to announce their supply side reforms that are supposed to show the market that they have a serious plan and everything will work out ok. 
 

But look at what areas they are looking to reform and they’ve got no chance of getting them all through parliament. Johnson briefed multiple times he was going to change planning rules to make it easier to build and had to back down every time after it became clear a load of his MPs would vote it down. And he had (initially) a lot more goodwill with his party than Truss has. 

 

Immigration she won’t get through since she wants to make it easier for struggling sectors to recruit from abroad. ERG will vote that down. Even stuff like moving the working time directive and the limits on the amount of children childcare workers can look after will be controversial and put pressure on Tories not to pass it. 
 

No chance the Tories vote all these things through and also vote through the 45pc tax  rate cut and the cut to benefits. Enough of them know it’ll be absolutely suicidal to be associated with this when they come to campaign to be elected again. 
 

 

I agree with most of that, but immigration will be no issue as long as they control it. And even more likely use these charter cities or whatever they're calling them to allow them to work 100 hours per week and below minimum wage, probably done in some sort of bundle including putting them in shared living facilities priced into the job. It'll just be a license to bring in a form of slavery. 

[Arniepie]

5 hours ago, Numero Veinticinco said:

Top bunch of lads, etc.

Look at those replies

[Arniepie]

1 hour ago, Barrington Womble said:

And onto phase 2 of complete national destruction. Fuck me. We have to stop this shit. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/30/liz-truss-to-push-ahead-with-unlimited-investment-zones-despite-costs-row

 

 

Genuine question

Is that kwatang on the spectrum?

[littletedwest]

1 minute ago, Arniepie said:

Genuine question

Is that kwatang on the spectrum?

He's defo on the massive cunt spectrum 

[Sugar Ape]

31 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

I agree with most of that, but immigration will be no issue as long as they control it. And even more likely use these charter cities or whatever they're calling them to allow them to work 100 hours per week and below minimum wage, probably done in some sort of bundle including putting them in shared living facilities priced into the job. It'll just be a license to bring in a form of slavery. 

You may be right, but I think they’ll struggle to get it through. I mean, good chance she doesn’t even make it that far without being forced to either fuck Kwarteng off to save her own skin or reverse some of her reforms due to pressure, but if she does then she’ll have big problems passing all this. 
 

I can see something like One nation Tory types will revolt and block the 45pc tax cut and then a load of the right wing headbangers will reply in kind and block things that piss them off and a lot of them are evangelical about not increasing immigration numbers no matter how valid the need may be. 
 

Truss doesn’t have a lot of backing amongst her MPs really. She only got 50 votes in the first round. She didn’t try and offer an olive branch to her MPs who didn’t support her and fucked them all off to the backbenches. Patel will be strongly opposed to increasing immigration and probably has followers she can call upon and her own Home Secretary is even worse than Patel, which I didn’t think was possible. 
 

Loads of these Libertarian nut jobs are backing her because they think she’s bringing in the tax cuts they wank over and other things they want like Fracking. If they start to get blocked then they’ll lose their shit. The Daily Mail will have headlines calling Tory MPs traitors. 
 

 

[Kepler-186]

1 hour ago, Barrington Womble said:

I agree with most of that, but immigration will be no issue as long as they control it. And even more likely use these charter cities or whatever they're calling them to allow them to work 100 hours per week and below minimum wage, probably done in some sort of bundle including putting them in shared living facilities priced into the job. It'll just be a license to bring in a form of slavery. 

Did you see last Friday Steve Rotherham responded to the “charter city” stuff on his Twitter.

 

Called it conspiracy theory, and he’d never let workers rights be downgraded. 
 

It’s definitely the direction of travel of this government with the mooted anti strike legislation, privatisation on steroids, and running roughshod over existing planning and environmental legislation. 
 

The freeport up in Teeside is getting flak about all the marine life dying off up there, and the mayor is a Tory headbanger. 
 

Hopefully they won’t get away with a lot of it. 

[Sugar Ape]

 

[Section_31]

2 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

 

 

They're thick as fuck, they really are. People see what they're going to say and do an age before they actually try and do it. 

 

People won't stand for it, they may not riot but they'll vote. They're done for.

 

Even the people who think her batshit ideas will work say it'll take at least five years. Good luck selling that in 2024.

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/simon-clarke-interview-truss-is-enjoying-her-chance-to-pull-britain-out-of-its-fools-paradise-rndrm9kn6

 

It has been, Simon Clarke admits with a little understatement, an “uncomfortable week” for the government. As part of the “quad” of Liz Truss’s closest political allies, Clarke has had a ringside seat for both the formulation of Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated “pro-growth” budget and the crisis talks to deal with the fallout. But as he talks, under a portrait of the Queen and next to the obligatory ministerial Union Jack in his Westminster office, the new secretary of state for levelling up is unrepentant.

 

Alongside his boss in Downing Street who, he says, is “astonishingly resilient”, Clarke, 38, is convinced the market turmoil will pass. And more importantly that the new government is doing fundamentally the right thing — no matter what the public might think of it now.

 

“If I was to describe one word for Liz at the moment, it is purposeful,” he says. “She knew — and this was certainly something we discussed during the summer — that this would not be a comfortable process.

 

“[She knew] particularly early on, there would be real potential unpopularity to be courted in seeking to say things and do things which weren’t going to be easy or quick wins. Frankly, she is doing what she believes is right. And I think she’s enjoying having the chance to do that. She’s obviously, you know, carrying pressures, which most of us would find pretty crushing. But she’s clear in her own mind and her conscience is clear that this is the right thing to do.”

 

Kwarteng’s £45 billion of tax cuts led to a savage response from the markets and voters. The pound fell to a record low, while the Bank of England had to make an emergency £65 billion intervention to shore up pension funds.

 

Truss, a relative unknown to many voters a week ago, is hugely unpopular. In the space of four days Labour has gone from a 17-point lead over the Tories, the biggest since 2001, to a 33-point lead, the biggest in any poll since the late 1990s.

 

Truss and her top team, however, appear determined to push ahead, their political and ideological vision apparently undimmed. Did they envisage this week’s market carnage when they were drawing up the budget? Clarke suggests they did. “It’s fair to say that how the market is going to respond is always hard to forecast but yeah, we understood and I think we accept it now,” he says.

 

The government, he argues, must channel Margaret Thatcher and stay the course. “This is a fundamental departure from where we’ve been,” he says. “In some ways there is an analogy with the 1980s and what the Thatcher government was seeking to do in terms of a reset moment where you fundamentally revisit how not just the previous government but multiple governments have addressed the fundamentals of the economy.

 

“Our job is to show the same rigour and frankly resilience in the face of the inevitable buffeting that is now going on. To close that gap between the vision and people’s wider understanding of what we’re seeking to do here.”

 

The budget was “contentious”, as Clarke puts it, but “you have to embrace the fact that there are some things where it’s good to have a contentious policy”.

 

He adds: “There is absolutely no question on the supply side reform issues that we have ducked a lot of stuff like childcare, like how you boost home ownership, for far too long. We have accepted the gimmickry that the 45p rate is a net tax raiser. These are battles that are worth having.

 

“It is undoubtedly the case that this country has not been in a good place for a long time on a lot of these economic fundamentals. We have acquired spending habits that outstrip our ability to pay for it. That needs to change.” The markets, he suggests, overreacted, pointing to the fact that the government telegraphed two of the biggest tax cuts — reversing the rise in national insurance and freezing corporation tax — in advance.

 

“It’s not for me to criticise the markets, the market has its own wisdom. We should respect that,” he says. “But I do think it’s worth reaffirming that what we have done is cancelled some tax rises which were in anticipation rather than already in effect. And we’ve restored the top rate of tax which applied until, I think, the 2009 budget.”

 

The government is now facing a battle to restore fiscal credibility. Clarke says that there will have to be significant cuts in public spending, arguing that for too long the West has lived in a “fool’s paradise”.

 

He says: “My big concern in politics is that western Europe is just living in a fool’s paradise whereby we can be ever less productive relative to our peers, and yet still enjoy a very large welfare state and persist in thinking that the two are somehow compatible over the medium to long term.

 

“They’re not. We need to address that precisely because in the end, if we want those strong public services then we are going to have to pay for them. I think it is important that we look at a state which is extremely large, and look at how we can make sure that it is in full alignment with a lower tax economy.” Put simply, Clarke is making the case that tax cuts need to be matched by significant cuts in public spending, particularly the welfare budget.

 

While the scale of these is not yet clear, the Resolution Foundation has suggested they may need to be as much as £35 billion. With the NHS and defence spending effectively protected, that means significant cuts elsewhere, particularly for welfare. As recently as June, when he was still in the Treasury, Clarke defended Sunak’s decision not to cut taxes. The levelling up secretary says that he remains committed to “spending discipline”.

 

“I do think it’s very hard to cut taxes if you don’t have the commensurate profile of spending and the supply side reform. If we’re adopting this plan, which I think is exciting and fundamentally addresses the competitiveness issue, the rest of the piece needs to move in tandem.

 

“We are privileged to deal with very large budgets. My experience as CST [chief secretary to the Treasury] is that there is always something you can do to trim the fat.”

 

Johnson’s premiership included big commitments on capital spending, including £4.2 billion for 40 hospitals, £11.5 billion for affordable homes, alongside new roads, railways and £2 billion of investment in cycling and walking. Some of this, Clarke says, will have to give. “One of the things which the PM has been really clear about is the need for a real prioritisation of those things that matter the most,” he says.

 

“So logically, other things either have to be cancelled, or move to the right in terms of when they’re delivered. To govern is to choose.” What would Clarke say to constituents facing huge rises in their mortgage rates? “Clearly interest rates are a matter for the Bank,” he says. “They are striking the difficult balance between the discipline the markets require and what the economy needs in order to grow. It’s vital that we ease that pressure on rates by living within our means.”

 

He does not think that the housing markets will collapse, and is optimistic that the economy will begin to turn early next year when he thinks mortgage rates will begin to fall. “The worst of the situation is already behind us in terms of that heightened anxiety in recent days,” he says. “Do I believe that we will see things improve very markedly as we move into 2023? Yes I do.

 

“I don’t think that there’s anything here which can’t fundamentally be addressed by setting out a strategy that the markets have confidence in.”

 

The government believes that its broader reforms, cutting regulations, simplifying the planning process and relaxing immigration restrictions, will be fundamental. Planning reforms, one of the thorniest issues for the Conservatives over the past 12 years, lie within Clarke’s brief. Truss has scrapped housing targets and will be keen to avoid the mass revolts over the issue — followed by inevitable U-turns — her predecessors had.

 

For Clarke, incentives are the key. “In removing those targets, can we in any way back away from the fact that we need to build homes? No we can’t.” He says Tory MPs who were at the forefront of opposing planning reforms “rightly emphasise the imperative of building on brownfield rather than greenfield sites”.

 

“We are working on a package of measures to try and go with the grain of people’s instincts on this. For too long housing policy is something that Whitehall has sought to do to communities rather than with.”

 

Britain has failed to build the homes it needs since the time of Harold Macmillan, the Tory prime minister five decades ago, Clarke says.

 

“The fact the green belt is larger today than it was when Margaret Thatcher came to power is an extraordinary state of affairs,” he says. “This country has got issues with housebuilding. But we also need to protect the spaces that people love and to avoid a sense that the government is threatening the very things that make communities nice places in which to live.”

 

He said the planning system should most fundamentally be about popular consent and should create incentives for residents to support development.

 

“What I would like is to have a system . . . whereby if you’re a resident of X community there is something in it for you about a new settlement in your area.”

 

And in these new straitened fiscal times what about levelling up, both his ministerial brief and a cause he has long championed as an MP for Middlesborough? Clarke insists that Truss remains as committed to levelling up as Boris Johnson.

 

“It’s absolutely fundamental to why the PM’s in politics. There is a total commitment as we aim to boost growth, that we do so in a way which actually spreads that growth more evenly across the United Kingdom.”

 

But as the past few days have shown, Truss’s plans to drive that growth is fraught with both political and economical peril.

While Clarke, an early supporter of the prime minister, is a true believer there are plenty of his colleagues who aren’t.

 

If he and Truss are right, there are still going to be plenty more “uncomfortable” weeks ahead. If they’re wrong, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

[Gnasher]

Margarine Thatcher.

[littletedwest]

He's fucking mental

[Section_31]

High functioning psychopaths. They're the problem.

[Juniper]

[Gnasher]

Fucking hell look at this latest Labour poll lead,

 

 

 

 

[Anubis]

1 hour ago, littletedwest said:

He's fucking mental

He is. This is kind of unbridled, off the chain, fuckwittery we see in the more extreme US politicians.

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.ft.com/content/d5f1d564-8c08-4711-b11d-9c6c7759f2b8
 

The Tories have become unmoored from the British people

 

In a single week, Britain has gone from being one among many nations facing fierce economic headwinds to being a financial basket case, its currency plunging, bond yields and mortgage rates rising and pension funds scrambling to stay afloat.

 

One question has repeatedly popped up: why did the mini-Budget trigger such chaos, given that most of it had already been trailed and that the cost of the unexpected 1p cut to the basic rate of income tax and elimination of the top rate pales in comparison to the energy price guarantee.

 

This misses two key things. First, the government’s hand was forced on energy bills. Their policy will save livelihoods and perhaps even lives. It’s not cheap, but it’s perfectly rational. Last Friday’s tax cuts, by comparison, were an unforced fiscal error. The number may be smaller, but it signals a departure from sensible economic thinking.

 

And that brings us to the second problem: the scale of this departure. A week into “Trussonomics”, one could make the case that this represents the first time in modern history that the government of a major developed country has decided to completely unmoor itself from not only economic orthodoxy but its own electorate.

 

Every few years, hundreds of political scientistsevaluate political parties on various issues, from the environment to law and order, gender issues to the redistribution of wealth. As part of this they place these parties along the left-right scale of economics, with the far left indicating full-blown communism and the far right the most extreme low regulation, low tax, free-market approach.

 

Until last week, the Conservative party looked like a relatively normal centre-right party on economics, scoring a 7 on the scale from 0 (far left) to 10 (far right). This placed it equidistant between Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party in France and the more hardline US Republicans.

 

Last Friday, that all changed. In a snap FT survey of a group of British political scientists across the political spectrum, the consensus was that under Prime Minister Liz Truss and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tories now score a stunning 9.4. This puts them well beyond where the Republicans stood under Donald Trump, and just to the right of the Brazilian Social Liberal party that took Jair Bolsonaro to power in 2018.

 

Out of 275 parties in 61 countries, the Tories under Trussonomics rank as the most rightwing of all. It should not then be surprising that such a voluntary swerve to the right spooked the markets far more than other costlier but sensible policies.

 

Between the Bank of England’s interventions and the possibility of some moderation before the Kwarteng’s November statement, the economic crisis may abate somewhat. But the damage to the UK’s reputation, and that of the Conservative party, may already be done.
 

On the same economic scale where Truss’s government now scores a 9.4, the average UK voter positions themselves at 3.1 and the average Conservative at 4.2. The Tories have plotted a course to the very edge of the economic map, and when they scan the horizon there is nobody to be seen.

 

 

 

[Sugar Ape]

 

[Gnasher]

12 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

The mad thing is, the purported reason they won’t release the OBR forecast until November is to give them a chance to announce their supply side reforms that are supposed to show the market that they have a serious plan and everything will work out ok. 
 

But look at what areas they are looking to reform and they’ve got no chance of getting them all through parliament. Johnson briefed multiple times he was going to change planning rules to make it easier to build and had to back down every time after it became clear a load of his MPs would vote it down. And he had (initially) a lot more goodwill with his party than Truss has. 

 

Immigration she won’t get through since she wants to make it easier for struggling sectors to recruit from abroad. ERG will vote that down. Even stuff like moving the working time directive and the limits on the amount of children childcare workers can look after will be controversial and put pressure on Tories not to pass it. 
 

No chance the Tories vote all these things through and also vote through the 45pc tax  rate cut and the cut to benefits. Enough of them know it’ll be absolutely suicidal to be associated with this when they come to campaign to be elected again. 
 

 

 

 

 

[Gnasher]

Someone on twitter; for decades the Tories pissed over your leg and told you it's raining, now they are pissing all over you and telling you it's piss. 

 

[Arniepie]

Looks like murdoch has got her back.

Article in the rag today

 

[Vincent Vega]

6 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

Looks like murdoch has got her back.

Article in the rag today

 

The stuff she is doing is his wet dream so that’s hardly surprising.

[Vincent Vega]

Came across this old interview with Eddie Mair who knew how to speak to dickheads in the government. He even adopted this approach with Johnson when he was at the BBC.