[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