[Youngian]

No food in the north judging by the painfully thin legs of the hoodie in winkle pickers.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Bit of a tangent, but this Independent article is a classic of the "Rachel Reeves cancelled your new railway line" genre.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 10712.html

Interesting to hear that £85m pays for 'Sixteen new train stations and 250 miles of railway lines that would benefit millions of passengers". These projects had been "started", apparently. Which will be news to a few people.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Reeves has raised taxes on the rich and put up taxes and increased borrowing. Trickle down economics and austerity, apparently.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -economics

Does he know that Heathrow Expansion and the Ox-Cam arc are private investments, which the government's proposing to allow to happen rather than block? As is the Old Trafford redevelopment, which last time I checked in the North.

And the non-doms are mentioned. Does he actually know how minor the tweak was? Is it good or bad? He doesn't care, he's just like a lobby journo, "Reeves gives in to non doms".

Labour ministers should instead focus on protecting households from utility bills and transport and housing costs, which remain high and will not be falling far any time soon.

Well, housing costs for lots are predicted to fall soon, repeatedly. Goldman Sachs reckons interest rates will fall 5 times this year. But sure, house prices won't fall any time soon. Maybe a good idea to make it much easier to build, like they're actually doing then. And wages are doing pretty well, not that it's ever reported.

Investment (business and public) increases growth. Some of the efforts they're making to encourage investment seem a bit much, but it's not a "myth". Nor is it clear why the benefits of this growth aren't going percolate widely. Jobs in the Ox-Cam arc ought to be pretty decent, no?

There's also a silly sneer about this stuff coming to fruition towards the end of the decade. Yeah, the bastards, planning ahead.

[The Weeping Angel]

Rafeal Behr

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... d-miliband

The arc of Miliband’s influence describes a tension that is still unresolved in the Starmer project – between Labour’s self-image as a party with radical purpose and the constant fear of alienating voters with the wrong kind of radicalism.

The pattern was prefigured in the fate of the £28bn annual investment in low-carbon technology that Rachel Reeves pledged in a speech to Labour conference in 2021. She said she would be Britain’s first “green chancellor”.

Reeves, a former Miliband protege, had held the shadow Treasury brief for less than six months. She later came to see the £28bn figure as a fiscal and political liability – a heap of ammunition for Tory election propaganda that would depict Labour as debt-addicted spendthrifts. The green chancellor wrought herself instead into an “iron chancellor”. Miliband’s climate-friendly industrial strategy made it into the 2024 manifesto, but with a drastically reduced budget.

To sum up government bad.

[The Weeping Angel]

Comments are the usual bunch of frothing at the mouth loonies here are a few examples.

Many of the big ideas that the Starmer-Reeves government pursues are simply ideas first proposed by the Tories. My loathing of this government - already profound - becomes even more acute as I read today that Labour will revive the aborted Tory benefits bill which empowers perhaps the most morally corrupt, and administratively most chaotic, of all government departments, the DWP, to force entry to benefits recipients' homes and seize their goods (should an AI trawl - AI! - of their bank accounts raise suspicions of benefits fraud). Can you imagine how many perfectly innocent individuals will suffer as a consequence of this bill? I can all too easily, for I know how inefficient and plain wicked the DWP is.

And this under a supposedly Labour government.

I did not vote Labour in the last GE - there was ample indication from long before the last GE as to the direction they intended taking - but their zealous application of what are always Tory approaches to dealing with various issues makes me angrier than ever.

Indeed, I loathe the Starmer-Reeves regime so much that I shall not mourn should even Reform UK be the vehicle of their downfall in the next GE (a downfall I see as inevitable, for by May 2029, Labour will have fixed nothing that needed fixing, and no one will be feeling any better off or any more financially secure).

How much worse could it be for ordinary folks, when Labour loses the next GE, than it already is?

Reeves went for pensioners and poor families with more than two children because it was easy. Going after the real wealthy would take backbone and guts.

Labour is not frightened of alienating voters.
Labour is frightened of alienating DONORS.

Starmer is an English nationalist masquerading as PM of the United Kingdom.

They’re paying INEOS money to open an oil refinery in Belgium of all places while refusing to pay any money to keep the last oil refinery in Scotland open.

Same with GB energy. Nominally headquartered in Aberdeen as a sop but the vast majority of jobs are going to England.

When are Scots going to wake up and realise this?

[Tubby Isaacs]

So a couple of days after "Labour are the worst vandals we've ever had", Monbiot discovers that the proposed land use framework is actually good. George doesn't admit he might have been wrong, but says it might not happen because Reeves hates regulators and loves cuts. Anything proposed by his mates of course definitely happens. Almost like the purpose of that growth talk you don't like is to raise money for stuff like restoring nature, George. Maybe growth doesn't mean you have to turn a profit on every newt or something.



https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot. ... zgbs5ccs2m

[RedSparrows]

John Crace, nailing it as ever:

You might have half expected Johnson to have pitched up at the third and last day of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference at the ExCeL centre in London. He would have fitted right in. A deeply unserious man for deeply serious times. ARC seems to exist in its own ecosphere, cocooned from the real world. So much so, they seem to be a year behind the rest of us. None of them has realised that their man is now calling the shots on wokery from the White House. They prefer to be the victim. On the outside looking in.

Any discussion on the most important issues of the day, like the war in Ukraine, appeared to have been kept off the schedule. Just speaker after speaker congratulating themselves on saying the unsayable, apparently unaware that no one was stopping them saying anything. If you want to understand the importance of free speech, ask Alexei Navalny. Except you can’t.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -fantasies

[The Weeping Angel]

Here's my blunt truth. Simon Jenkins is a contrarian arse who pretends to be a serious thinker.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ealignment

Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?

If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.

As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.

Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.

[Youngian]

Here's my blunt truth. Simon Jenkins is a contrarian arse who pretends to be a serious thinker.

Amonst the strong evidence for that proposition in the article

Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing.

I've forgotten what Jenkins's wheelhouse used to be. Or was he a prototype rentaquoter before the likes of Carole Malone and Owen Jones were available?

[The Weeping Angel]

John Harris

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... g-populism

Or there might be a plan B. Labour politicians might try their best to rebuild towns such as Pontypool, answer their call for esteem and security, and help them acquire the things whose scarcity informs all those conversations about outsiders: jobs and homes, chiefly, along with the sense that they are no less valued than people who live in more affluent places. They could do that while holding on to what is left of the party’s liberal values, and finally coming up with a convincing response to an increasingly urgent question. If the world is being wrecked by bigoted, climate-denying authoritarians, is leaning into their politics really any kind of answer?

I mean honestly what does this mean? Also in the piece Harris quotes people who say they want immigrants thrown out how does promising to say they're no less valued than people who live in more affluent areas going to help?

[Abernathy]

I've forgotten what Jenkins's wheelhouse used to be. Or was he a prototype rentaquoter before the likes of Carole Malone and Owen Jones were available?

Congratulations on yoking together Squealer Jones and Terrahawk Malone. Talk about birds of a feather.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Bizarrely, the Guardian continues to give this chap columns on housing.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -171087102

Even though people called him out on it before, he actually still thinks this is a killer point.

This fact might surprise you: in the UK there are more homes per person now that at any time in history.

Not only that there are more homes per household now than there were fifty years ago. We've been building homes significantly faster than the population has been rising yet housing costs are higher than ever.

It doesn't surprise me and it tells us very little about demand. 50 years ago, there were lots of large families living in one house. What's his plan? Get two smaller families and perhaps one single OAP to move into a house together? Admittedly, the housing shortage would disappear if you did that.

Here's another of his zingers. If only there were recent examples of councils trying their hand at being property developers and it blowing up in everybody's face?

If the opportunities for investors in our cities are so exciting, why are we giving them away? If you build a conservatory on your house would you rather pay for and own that conservatory yourself or get the money from an overseas investor then have to pay them to use it?

And aren't lots of these developments going to be for private sale anyway?

[davidjay]

Owen's off again.

Good morning Britain – prepare to be told yet again that decline is all you deserve

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... 1742980299

[Abernathy]

Owen's off again.

Good morning Britain – prepare to be told yet again that decline is all you deserve

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... 1742980299

Sorry. Not even going to bother reading that.