UK Conservative Party Leadership Election

I have to be honest here - I cannot see why on earth the top rate has been lowered to 40% from 45%. In of itself it's not a costly act as that rate applies to a small minority of taxpayers but as a gesture it seems highly provocative in times of need when people are struggling. It's almost political suicide, well probably is. So take Denise Coates, owner of Bet365. Her salary was over £300m last year (this is not as bad as it sounds as it's a privately-owned business and with a few phone calls to an accountant she could pay 19% as opposed to the full income tax she opts to pay) so 45% of that is £135 million for the treasury. Off of one person. Assuming equivalence this financial year, she will pay £120m. So £15m extra in her pocket, she clearly doesn't want or need. OK, an extreme example but it indicates the pointlessness both financially and politically.
Yep, it’s not going to stop the hyper rich still doing all they can to avoid paying tax where possible and the timing when most are struggling is amazing. It is not going to coax those on that rate to do anything dramatic to help the economy.

If they wanted to do tax cuts not sure why they didn’t just leave it at reversing the NI and then maybe raise the level at which you start to pay tax. Keep it at 20p but up the thresholds. Would think that will benefit a majority of the population with more of a focus on those at the lower end of the pay scale.

Then possibly go about the benefits system but god knows how you even start doing that in a fair manner. Now that would cost a fair few quid to manage.
 
I have to be honest here - I cannot see why on earth the top rate has been lowered to 40% from 45%. In of itself it's not a costly act as that rate applies to a small minority of taxpayers but as a gesture it seems highly provocative in times of need when people are struggling. It's almost political suicide, well probably is. So take Denise Coates, owner of Bet365. Her salary was over £300m last year (this is not as bad as it sounds as it's a privately-owned business and with a few phone calls to an accountant she could pay 19% as opposed to the full income tax she opts to pay) so 45% of that is £135 million for the treasury. Off of one person. Assuming equivalence this financial year, she will pay £120m. So £15m extra in her pocket, she clearly doesn't want or need. OK, an extreme example but it indicates the pointlessness both financially and politically.
all this ppl saved so much on new tax lol
 

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Nothing will quite beat Amazon's tax-swerving of a few years ago, when it was discovered they were paying taxes into the UK's coffers to the tune of thousands - a modern 'classic', if ever I saw it.

Yet the obvious targets of animosity will always be the top earners that find every loophole under the sun to avoid paying their allocated share.

But in all honesty, everyone here would do it too, and jump through every hoop imaginable to protect their wealth and assets, and not exactly be falling over themselves to appease those that say they should pay more tax- stating one's virtue and integrity towards helping an indifferent government, and actually doing it, are separate things.

And end of the day, those countries that are considered richest and whose people have all the modern conveniences they could desire will always have a gaggle of kingpins that drive commerce, attract new investment, hire highly skilled people and so forth. Simply having them here is of far greater benefit to a country's overall clout, than not. This is why they're constantly being cut slack and are essentially a protected species, and wanting to rid yourself of all of them, I'd be careful what I wished for :laugh:
 
Again it's just an opinion poll, but these are unheard of numbers, the extent to which Truss/Kwarteng have just demolished the Conservative Party's credibility on the economy is astonishing.

And they were both out today, refusing to back down, refusing to accept any responsibility, and that they were going to stay on target. On top of that Truss was roundly taken to pieces by several regional radio presenters this morning, where I guess she thought she was going to get an easy ride, but instead found people passionate and knowledgeable about their regions, and who didn't give a shit about asking tough questions because they don't have to worry about maintaining 'access' to the inner political circle.

Now of course there is the possibility here that this promised economic miracle actually happens, that Truss, Kwarteng and their motley collection of 'non-conformist' economic advisers have seen something that no one else has seen, and they can turn this whole thing around in two years - but if they can't, I think we're looking at a Labour win on par with Blair's win in 1997, and then most likely two or three terms of a Labour government.

If nothing else though. they've set a new world record for 'worst fuck up within one month of starting a new job', it's not everyone who can say they've lost sixty-five billion quid and turned their entire nation into an economic basket case before they've even received their first month's pay.

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This is what the dying embers of an 'era' look like. After the Tory - Labour - Tory power shifts, each equalling well over a decade, it's pretty rare for a party to keep that foothold, as people simply get fed up and want any sort of change 'up top'.

Although the five years of ConLib don't count :p

I'd imagine if indeed there was a GE at this moment in time, Labour would take a huge slice of the pie, though perhaps not 'landslide'- level capitulation levels of '97. Fact is even I don't have much hope for the current Tory lot, as the quality gets ever- watered down and evermore out of touch with the electorate, never mind its own party base.

So chances are unless Labour were to come up with something so revelatory and actually workable, I'd likely not even bother voting at all, for clearly it matters little in the continuous saga of Tory hand-me-downs anyway. Not that anyone voted Truss & co in, is it?

You'd think losing £65bil would be somewhat of a 'job scrutinizer', and that they'd take pariah status rivalling Nick Leeson, yet somehow Truss & Kwarteng are being given, what, time to 'do better'? 🤔

I think the Tories have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days....
 
This is what the dying embers of an 'era' look like. After the Tory - Labour - Tory power shifts, each equalling well over a decade, it's pretty rare for a party to keep that foothold, as people simply get fed up and want any sort of change 'up top'.



I think the Tories have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days....
Well, that's game over then...
 
This is what the dying embers of an 'era' look like. After the Tory - Labour - Tory power shifts, each equalling well over a decade, it's pretty rare for a party to keep that foothold, as people simply get fed up and want any sort of change 'up top'.

Although the five years of ConLib don't count :p

I'd imagine if indeed there was a GE at this moment in time, Labour would take a huge slice of the pie, though perhaps not 'landslide'- level capitulation levels of '97. Fact is even I don't have much hope for the current Tory lot, as the quality gets ever- watered down and evermore out of touch with the electorate, never mind its own party base.

So chances are unless Labour were to come up with something so revelatory and actually workable, I'd likely not even bother voting at all, for clearly it matters little in the continuous saga of Tory hand-me-downs anyway. Not that anyone voted Truss & co in, is it?

You'd think losing £65bil would be somewhat of a 'job scrutinizer', and that they'd take pariah status rivalling Nick Leeson, yet somehow Truss & Kwarteng are being given, what, time to 'do better'? 🤔

I think the Tories have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days....

Yes we have seen this sort of thing before, and TBH I don't think it's healthy, where there is competition, it should be healthy competition, where the choices on offer all have compelling aspects to their prospectus.

For example, in the PC CPU space, for quite a few years Intel were absolutely dominant, AMD's products were poor, they couldn't compete on performance, they ran stupidly hot and noisy, and even at keen prices they were very unappealing. End result, Intel just rested on their laurels for years, churning out basically the same quad-core processors year after year, at stupidly high prices. Yes there was technically a choice, but Intel was the only choice that made sense, and they knew it.

And then finally in 2017 AMD put out their Ryzen architecture CPUs, swinging right out of the gate with 8 cores (Intel were still on 4), a whole new efficient architecture, at super prices, making them very compelling propositions, with 6 and 4 core variants filling out the product stack.

They turned the CPU market upside down overnight, Intel went straight into panic mode and had to actually start fighting back, suddenly pulling a 6 core processor out of their arse, followed not long after by an 8 core part. (So they could have done it for all those years, they just didn't have to because there was no competition.)

You get the idea, Intel and AMD were competing again, and it meant the consumer got better products, at competitive prices, with both companies duking it out to get one over on each other.

So it goes with politics, during the New Labour years the Tories disappeared into the wilderness, they were fighting more with each other than they were with Labour, the next two general elections were basically gimmes for Blair, but this is a bad thing. Like Intel, in some regards they got complacent, and over-confident, policies that shouldn't have made it out of the door did so, because there was no one around to properly challenge them, culminating of course in the travesty of the Iraq War, and a final term that was marred by infighting and some awful blunders.

I can see the same thing happening again, the destruction job that Truss looks like doing could effectively see the Tories out of 'meaningful opposition', to all intents and purposes, for quite some time, and I don't think that's healthy for politics, or the country.

(And of course by the mid 90s the Tories were in absolute disarray, ripping themselves to shreds over Europe (sounds familiar!.....) and giving Labour something of an open goal.)

The next two years are certainly going to be fascinating, I'm not a huge fan of Starmer, and his Labour Party is very centrist, you could probably pitch it as 'centre left' but that's about it, he has done a pretty effective job of expunging 'undesirable' left wing elements (much to my chagrin, but hey, he wants to win an election), and he's knocked together a decent shadow cabinet. Also, more than anything perhaps, he looks serious and competent, which I suspect is something the people of the UK will absolutely be looking for come the next general election.

Personally I wish Sunak had won, I don't agree with his politics but he is at least competent and has a grasp on actual economics, something which appears to elude both Truss and Kwarteng. Yes he'd have given Labour a harder time but at least he wouldn't have blown up the UK's economy, and like Intel vs AMD post-2017, it would have been a decent fight.

Still, Truss is what we got, so thanks to all those Tory Party members who gave us, out of the entire list of candidates, the worst possible result.

I suspect the Tory Party will change its rules on leadership elections so something like this can never happen again....
 
There's an awful lot of nonsense to unpack in Lord David 'Wrong' Frost's brainfart in The Daily Telegraph today, although still finding time to complain about 'unreconciled Remainers' in the context of the current shitshow that the UK government has foisted upon us is quite the highlight.

You'll note here that none of these are actual policies, it's all just about 'belief' and 'confidence', whilst rejecting some things whilst embracing other things, but never with any detail, never with anything that could actually be translated into a meaningful plan of action.

It's exactly this mindset that Truss and Kwarteng were in when they threw a sixty-five billion pound hand grenade at the UK economy last Friday. We learned last night that the OBR had offered to provide an independent assessment of the likely effects of Kwarteng's announcement, but he refused to listen to it, and indeed when he made his announcement, said that the official OBR assessment would be along..... eventually. This is another major factor in what spooked the markets.

Government by 'belief' is a terrible idea, try paying your mortgage or rent with 'belief' and see how it far it gets you, make a terrible fuck up at work and explain to your boss that you had 'belief' you were doing the right thing, so you didn't need to read the instructions, but don't be surprised when you get handed your P45.

This is the endgame of the Brexit mindset in government, 'BELIEVE IN BRITAIN', to hell with those experts we've all had enough of, to hell with the facts, we'll run on belief and confidence alone.

Now those people are running the country, they've already cost us sixty-five billion quid from the emergency printing press, interest rate misery is incoming for millions of householders, and the rest of the world is looking at us like we've got a clown hat on.

Government is serious business, and it needs to be treated as such.

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Again it's just an opinion poll, but these are unheard of numbers, the extent to which Truss/Kwarteng have just demolished the Conservative Party's credibility on the economy is astonishing.

Yep, all Labour have to do is sit tight now until the GE, and not screw up, it's theirs for the taking, unfortunately.

Using tax cuts to "go for growth" is akin to applying a defibrillator to a corpse, given the endemic structural issues in the UK economy.
 
Pound's recovered to pre-tax cut levels I see....

Yes and all it cost was £65bn of taxpayer money, an implied promise to raise interest rates to levels that will ruin hundreds of thousands of UK households (if not millions), and the BoE stepping in with the printing press to save a wildly incompetent UK government from itself.

And all that just to get back to where we started from.

Result!
 
Yep, all Labour have to do is sit tight now until the GE, and not screw up, it's theirs for the taking, unfortunately.

Using tax cuts to "go for growth" is akin to applying a defibrillator to a corpse, given the endemic structural issues in the UK economy.
Difference being the person using it is probably qualified to do so

Would take a monumental fuck up but given seen Johnson promote himself from have I got news for you, and the 1992 unloseable election, who knows ;-)
 
'Hey Fred, I see you're looking after the house well, seems exactly the same since I last visited you a week ago.'

'Cheers Andy, yeah, I've spent sixty-five billion quid on it since then, I was hoping you'd notice'

'Fucking hell Fred.'
 
An excellent piece in The Times, which, lest we forget, is a right-wing Conservative Party supporting paper.

This is the paywall-removed version using SINISTER MEANS.

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And with a weary sense of inevitability, here comes the next wave of austerity.

Billions handed out in tax cuts to the rich, £65bn of money printed by the BoE to stabilise the pound and prevent multiple major pensions funds collapsing, interest rate rises that are going to wipe out a multitude of hard working British households, and now a kick in the face for those who already have least.

Tories gonna Tory, I suppose.

In July Truss said, 'I’m very clear, I’m not planning public spending reductions'.

Christ almighty the next general election can't come soon enough.

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It was always going to come back round eventually, I mean who actually believed the Tories wouldn't resume the towel-flicking shower camaraderie and pig-head hijinks at some point?

This ragtag cabinet has all the hallmarks of Cameron-esque 'direction', even if Cameron's lot still managed to have a competent handle on being somewhat measured with public finances. With Truss & Kwarteng, they're playing fast and loose with the economy under the notion we'll all reap the rewards 'down the line' *cough*

We all knew they'd cut taxes after having increased them, but seemingly this lot are going it alone, ignoring all around them as they pursue their 'vision'. I would say for someone touted as being extremely 'bright', Kwarteng sure has ropey timing and next to no flexibility in adjusting to crises, or even a 'Plan B'. Then it hit me - he doesn't care. Hell, one might even suspect them of short-circuiting the economy to usher in the Second Age of Austerity, nothing surprises me anymore! :laugh:
 
I honestly despair, the Cameron-era austerity policies were devastating enough, another dose will prove the final undoing of so many key UK institutions, I think this will be the final push the Tories need to dismantle the NHS and push the UK towards some sort of insurance based system. Of course privatised tendrils are already deeply embedded in many aspects of the NHS, but the 'free at the point of delivery' aspect still stands. I think that will possibly go now, we know for a fact this is what Truss wants, because she literally co-authored a book about it.

The question now is how much damage can she, and her cabinet of crazed ideologues, manage to wreak in the two years before they hopefully get kicked out.
 
The idea of some sort of insurance/alternative model (i say some because the likes of the Japanese model has, IIRC, major caveats around insurers and profits so there still remains a good bit of government control but generally believed that, whilst quality of care increases substantially, it comes at the expense of budgetary control going out the window) though shouldn't be dismissed right off the bat, especially given the current state of the current healthcare we have here (which, no, i don't think can be solved by simply ploughing more money into it).

Up here Scotland is due to implement the National Care Service - sort of creates Care, like Health, Boards. IMO it's another initiative doomed to failure (like the Integrated Health and Social Care before it and the Community Partnerships) but not surprising as the 'author' of it apparently didn't engage with Health and Social Care bodies prior to the recommendations. 🤭

No easy solution to the NHS atm - reform without major investment = waste of time, throwing more money but no reform = waste of time. Will probably remain a political football until that time comes.

Dentistry has been under stealth privatisation for a while now - CV-19 just helped to speed up the process - be getting the old door knob and string approach for 'care in the home' treatment in the future
 
"They all look the same to me....." :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::lolup::lolup:

Lefty rag The Mirror shows just why they are qualified to pour scorn on policies...not only that, to compound their ignorance, they put the picture under some right-on claptrap. You couldn't make it up.

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"They all look the same to me....." :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::lolup::lolup:

Lefty rag The Mirror shows just why they are qualified to pour scorn on policies...not only that, to compound their ignorance, they put the picture under some right-on claptrap. You couldn't make it up.

It'll be some junior hack just picking the wrong picture by accident in a 24 hour news room being run on a shoestring budget. As a fellow Private Eye reader you'll be all too well aware of how strained these operations are, constantly pressured to keep 'fresh content' on the website 24 hours per day.

Still, against the backdrop of blowing up the UK economy, this is definitely up there in significance with your shocking revelation a few days ago that republicans might not be overly fired up about singing the national anthem.
 
The idea of some sort of insurance/alternative model (i say some because the likes of the Japanese model has, IIRC, major caveats around insurers and profits so there still remains a good bit of government control but generally believed that, whilst quality of care increases substantially, it comes at the expense of budgetary control going out the window) though shouldn't be dismissed right off the bat, especially given the current state of the current healthcare we have here (which, no, i don't think can be solved by simply ploughing more money into it).

Up here Scotland is due to implement the National Care Service - sort of creates Care, like Health, Boards. IMO it's another initiative doomed to failure (like the Integrated Health and Social Care before it and the Community Partnerships) but not surprising as the 'author' of it apparently didn't engage with Health and Social Care bodies prior to the recommendations. 🤭

No easy solution to the NHS atm - reform without major investment = waste of time, throwing more money but no reform = waste of time. Will probably remain a political football until that time comes.

Dentistry has been under stealth privatisation for a while now - CV-19 just helped to speed up the process - be getting the old door knob and string approach for 'care in the home' treatment in the future

There's a conversation to be had, certainly, about what our health service and its funding will look like going forward into the future, but the people I'd least trust in the entire world to do this are the current incumbents of Downing Street.

It's worth remembering, for example, that under New Labour they had the pledge that anyone could see their GP within 48 hours of booking an appointment. The Tories recently announced that they were launching a target of anyone being able to see their GP within....... TWO WEEKS of booking an appointment.

That's a single startling example of how far backwards things have gone. The decade of austerity in particular has a lot to answer for.
 
I watched all of Truss's interview with Laura K on the BBC this morning so you don't have to.

She's dreadful. Every time she opens her mouth she just makes things worse.

TAKEAWAY POINTS:

The budget was all Kwasi's fault and they didn't discuss it with Cabinet.
There are absolutely some swingeing spending cuts on the way.
The answer to everything is 'our energy package'.
Except this question that she didn't appear to understand.

EDIT - I'm no fan of Johnson but at least he was sort of interesting, Truss is just a robot with the 'evil' dial turned to 11.

 
I watched all of Truss's interview with Laura K on the BBC this morning so you don't have to.

She's dreadful. Every time she opens her mouth she just makes things worse.

TAKEAWAY POINTS:

The budget was all Kwasi's fault and they didn't discuss it with Cabinet.
There are absolutely some swingeing spending cuts on the way.
The answer to everything is 'our energy package'.
Except this question that she didn't appear to understand.

EDIT - I'm no fan of Johnson but at least he was sort of interesting, Truss is just a robot with the 'evil' dial turned to 11.


So she's basically the Tories' Corbyn? Well, the opinion polls would suggest so.
 
With Gove relentlessly keeping up the Truss-bashing you'd have to question her suitability, even this early in.

In the few weeks she's been in power I don't think anybody expected a radical overhaul, yet that is what she gave us!

As mentioned, Johnson gave himself an early head start, through his charm offensive and bumbling ruthlessness, up until his post-Brexit usefulness ceased.

Truss has in this short timeframe proven herself to be inept AND unlikeable, which is a lil' bit of an Election- worrier if ever I saw it!

I'd already stated during the Conservative leadership challenge that I'd hoped she wouldn't prevail, and voila, here she is!

With the GE looming, the Tories may want to start anew with getting the right person in there, can't be any worse than now, surely?
 
I'd be quite interested in a Sturgeon - Truss face-off (not the mud wrestling variety, though both do wade in a lot of shite) if she manages to stick around (which she won't)- can disagree with Nic's policies (as i do) but debate/oratory wise she can certainly hold her own and more, which would be pretty much in contrast with Truss who struggles to even open her mouth, let alone string a sentence out of it.

But it'll all be moot as, bar a Kinnock, they're out. And the only folk sad to see that will be the SNP as they wouldn't even need to do anything, other than sit back and wait for the numbers to roll in
 

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