Liberal, Briton, ‘Centrist Fun Uncle’. Co-mod of m/neoliberal and c/neoliberal.
This is patently absurd. Labour already inherited the highest tax burden in 70 years from the Conservatives - this budget increases the tax burden by a further £40bn to fund extra spending. Government borrowing is also going to increase by an average of £32bn a year for the next five years due to this budget.
If this is what they call austerity, I’d hate to see what these people think government largesse looks like…
Will the clocks still go back and forward an hour to help the farmers get up early though?
He’s obviously talking his own book, but there does seem to be genuine concern that the government’s analysis of the non-dom crackdown suggests that, yes, it will lead to a reduction in tax revenue. Because many of these people can in fact just move…
I’m still annoyed that the Daily Star keeps getting credit for this joke.
The joke about Truss’s premiership having the shelf life of a lettuce was from the Economist. And it wasn’t about the 49 days she was PM - it was referencing the seven days or so that Truss was actually in the driving seat, once you take away the mourning period around the Queen’s death when nothing could happen, and then the period after the mini-budget when Jeremy Hunt and the grown-ups took charge.
What the Star did was just riff on the Economist’s joke by setting up a webcam.
A recent migrant, identifying himself as ‘Nigel F from Clacton’, told reporters he was thrilled by his new life in Russia and the prospect of not having to see brown people at the shops or gay people on TV anymore.
But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.
[…]
The judge said: "The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.
What I know about HR is that the employer actually has a tonne of leeway to get rid of people as long as they can demonstrate they have followed a proper process with an audit trail.
The reason this person was fired that’s mentioned in the headline (which I think isn’t unreasonable - of course you can’t call the customer a twat!) is kind of irrelevant here, it’s the fact the employer didn’t run a true process to back up the decision that has got them.
Wait, how many 25 year olds in 2024 do you think remember the Mighty Boosh (2003-07), or Chicken Run (2000), or Who Shot Phil Mitchell (2001), or Caroline Quentin-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2000), or know people who were extras in the Harry Potter films (2001-11), or remember the Animals of Farthing Wood TV programme (1993-97), or spilled their drink on Miquita Oliver at a squat party in 2007 (2007)?
This is exactly my issue. I’m not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I’m going to cause an accident because I’m so focused on the speedometer and not the road.
The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers’ subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can’t happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn’t just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.
‘Ah, Kamala, my old friend. Do you know the MAGA proverb that tells us cats and dogs are a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold in space.’
Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.
Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?
In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.
The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.
NIMBYs’ excuses are becoming more and more elaborate.
Sky invented football in 1992.
Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?
I was disagreeing with you perpetuating the lump of labour fallacy that one can be anti-immigrant for pro-worker reasons.
When nativists use this argument, it’s usually shit-stirrers deliberately trying to pit people against each other. They rely on the fact that the average person probably hasn’t taken the time to conduct a literature review of the economic studies of immigration, but might be able to be seduced by a superficially easy argument that all their ills can be blamed on some minority and drawing on some cherry-picked anecdotes.
The reality of immigration bears little relation to the skewed narrative the nativists are trying to sell. Irregular migration represents only a tiny fraction of UK immigration. Immigrants are no more likely to commit crime than natives. Immigration grows the economy and has little or no effect on jobs and wages. Immigrants are net contributors to the NHS and public services. Once you knock away all the far-right’s factual lies, it’s hard to find the nugget of a ‘legitimate’ reason why people might consider immigration to be one of the major ‘problems’ facing this country that doesn’t start and end with xenophobia.
The idea that the unions would legitimately oppose immigration is nonsense. Economic analysis of the actual impact of immigration has consistently shown that immigration has little-to-no negative impact on the incomes of native workers - immigrants don’t undercut the wages of native workers so the unions shouldn’t be worried about them.
A large part of that is because of the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. Unthoughtful people assume there’s a fixed number of jobs to be filled, but the reality is that immigrants don’t just fill jobs but also create jobs through their own demand for goods and services. But there are other factors too like entrepreneurialism and business start ups - immigrants, as evidenced by them being part of the small subset of people who are prepared to pack up their lives and move to another country, tend to be more entrepreneurial than the general population in either their home or host countries. Some of our biggest high street names like Tesco and M&S have immigrant origins.
The small caveat to this is that immigration in recent decades has been shown to have a tiny negative impact on the incomes of the lowest paid 20% of the population (of about -0.5%) but this is dwarfed by the positive impact it has on those further up the income spectrum (e.g. +1.7% for the richest 10%). Obviously +1.7% of a very rich person’s income is a lot more than -0.5% of a poor person’s income. So if the unions are rational and actually want to improve the lot of the poorest in society then they should be campaigning for a lot more immigration and a very small increase in taxes on the richest to fund redistribution of this income, which will more than compensate the poorest for the fraction of a percentage point of lost income from over two decades worth of immigration.
What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:
a) It’s not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany’s actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there’s a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I’d find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into…)
b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany’s story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant
I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say ‘fuck it, let’s just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?’
The MPs wanted Cleverly anyway but they shit the bed trying to engineer an easy opponent for him in the final two. He’s now said he’s not going to join the shadow cabinet, so while Badenoch has to deal with all the struggles of being LOTO, Cleverly will be on the backbenches, giving speeches to constituency parties, improving his reputation, sounding like some sort of experienced elder statesman to contrast with Badenoch.
A VONC to put Cleverly in charge seems very likely unless Starmer’s polling numbers really tank over the next few years.