[The Weeping Angel]

Or they’re dealing with an economic shock called Trump that’s going to give everywhere a cold?

Well according to the telegraph it's all because Reeves raised taxes on businesses.

[Tubby Isaacs]

UK growth predicted to be 2nd in the G7.

[The Weeping Angel]

Thta's funny all the news is growth will be down and the headroom will be wiped out.

[The Weeping Angel]

You have two cafes that employ 34 people that doesn't add up.

[davidjay]

And a timeline full of bigotry. Who'd have thought that, eh?

[The Weeping Angel]

Of course, meanwhile in other news.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ned-voters

Spring has finally arrived, and as customers enjoy a drink or two in the sunshine outside Runcorn’s branch of Wetherspoon’s on a Thursday afternoon, some are sympathetic to the local man in the news who has so dramatically fallen from grace.

“If somebody was mouthing off to me so much, I would have knocked him out myself,” says Jason Baldwin. “I don’t believe he should have lost his job.”

He is referring to Mike Amesbury, who won the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary seat for Labour with a thumping majority of almost 15,000 votes in July last year.

That, however, seems an age ago and now the talk of the town is of Amesbury’s decision last week to resign, having been handed a suspended prison sentence for punching a constituent. A byelection looms.

[Tubby Isaacs]

You have two cafes that employ 34 people that doesn't add up.

He says he's got another online business, whatever that means,

The only government mandated wage increase in the minimum wage. That's up by 6.7%, compared with CPI of about 3%, He must have a lot of minimum wage staff paid under the old NI threshold (which has come down quite a bit. I thought that was the most dubious bit of the tax rises, but on reflection, I wonder if it was leading to distortions like this. I don't really get why other employers should be subsidizing people with lots of employees doing part time work.

Seems too like he may be including some other cost rises like energy there.

[Crabcakes]

You have two cafes that employ 34 people that doesn't add up.

As ever, the real translation is “I can’t afford to run my businesses at the fat profit margin I like for me AND pay my staff decently. So fuck my staff.

Because as we all know, there’s nothing entrepreneurs like more than shutting down viable businesses for no reason.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The biggest minimum wage rise per hour would be £1.40 per hour, that's for 18 to 20 year olds. How many of his staff are going to be that age? If it's anywhere near 34, then I think he's pulling a borderline stroke here. The rise for 21 and over is a slightly less scary 77p per hour.

I'm sure that heart attack diagnosis came straight from the consultant. "This was caused by Labour", she didn't say.

[Abernathy]

The trouble with all this “I’ve had it with Labour, they’re nothing less than “Tory Lite”. Never voting Labour ever again” stuff is that, while it’s a kind of understandable reaction to the stuff that Labour in government is having to do at the start of a long and arduous process of putting things right after 14 continuous years of damaging Tory incompetence, corruption, and misgovernance, it fails to consider either what the alternative to withdrawing support for Labour before its remedial policies to correct the damage of 14 Tory years have had a chance properly to take effect may be, or what the effect may be of voting actively against Labour – particularly by voting again for the Tories, or by voting for Farage’s crypto-fascist Reform UK.
The answer to both questions, of course, is that this will, if followed to its logical conclusion at the next general election 4 years from now, result in the return of either a Tory government likely to be several degrees more corrupt, venal, and incompetent than those we endured from 2010 to 2024, or, worse, a coalition government comprised of Tory and Reform UK MPs in which Farage would play a leading role. Now, I’m willing to bet that neither of those outcomes is something that would be to the liking of the Tory Lite/Never Labour again complainers, which is why the casual dismissal of the 9 month old Starmer administration as “Tory Lite” is frankly, crap. But it is also a reminder both that Labour needs to hold its nerve, and of the truth of the old Harold Wilson adage that a week is a long time in politics – and 208 weeks is an even longer time.

[Andy McDandy]

Very true, and remember that the disasters we were promised have not come to pass. We'd have known if there were excess deaths of OAPs over winter, or if private schools were shutting down. The same reporters who gleefully predicted these things have not reported on any fulfilment of prophecies.

Issues like immigration will never go away, and there's no point in trying to satisfy the far right because they'll never be satisfied. But what Labour can do is shift public opinion from "may as well burn a few hotels down, they probably deserve it" to outrage at the fash thugs.

There's still 4 and a bit years to go, and so far we've seen nothing concrete from the opposition, just spend enough to fix everything from the LDs/SNP, and hand it all over to Trump from ReFuck. The Tories have spent 9 months going "No, not like that!", and let's be honest here, aside from Badenoch and the Shining Twins (Whateley and Trott), how many of them are in any way recognisable?

[Tubby Isaacs]

There's also a tedious chunk of people who think Labour should have "just scrapped Brexit" already. Anything else happening in Europe at all that might be more urgent? Whatever Britain thinks, Poles and Latvians aren't sat there thinking "Let's park defence and sort out trade fiction in Dover first". And anyway, banking credit on Defence should be helpful to Britain on other renegotiation.

[The Weeping Angel]

There's also a tedious chunk of people who think Labour should have "just scrapped Brexit" already. Anything else happening in Europe at all that might be more urgent? Whatever Britain thinks, Poles and Latvians aren't sat there thinking "Let's park defence and sort out trade fiction in Dover first". And anyway, banking credit on Defence should be helpful to Britain on other renegotiation.

Mainly to be found on Bluesky.

[Boiler]

There's also a tedious chunk of people who think Labour should have "just scrapped Brexit" already. Anything else happening in Europe at all that might be more urgent? Whatever Britain thinks, Poles and Latvians aren't sat there thinking "Let's park defence and sort out trade fiction in Dover first". And anyway, banking credit on Defence should be helpful to Britain on other renegotiation.

Mainly to be found on Bluesky.

And BTL on the Guardian.

[The Weeping Angel]

Talking of Bluesky



Top comment is someone claiming that is all Mcfaddenism which is a cross party consensus to do anything apparently.

[Boiler]

What's it like for Greater Lincolnshire (I think), where Andrea Jenkyns is standing for Reform?

[The Weeping Angel]

You have two cafes that employ 34 people that doesn't add up.

He says he's got another online business, whatever that means,

The only government mandated wage increase in the minimum wage. That's up by 6.7%, compared with CPI of about 3%, He must have a lot of minimum wage staff paid under the old NI threshold (which has come down quite a bit. I thought that was the most dubious bit of the tax rises, but on reflection, I wonder if it was leading to distortions like this. I don't really get why other employers should be subsidizing people with lots of employees doing part time work.

Seems too like he may be including some other cost rises like energy there.

Been hearing a lot about about how changes to the NI threshold will lead to a collapse in the business sector.

[davidjay]

Does no-one ever raise their prices anymore?

[NevTheSweeper]

[Andy McDandy]

Fairly sure that retweeting (or Skying or whatever) your own posts is like 'liking' your own Facebook posts.

Who are LBC Watch and...wait, no, I don't care.