People who think the alternative is worse, or just as bad. Up to this year I had never, ever voted for Labour.
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Me too. And after this year I can’t see me ever voting Labour again. I feel dirtied by it, but TM’s snap attempt at a power grab and the sickening FPTP system made it necessary.
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You know I never could understand why people didn’t vote, folks have died for the right for us to vote afterall…that is until the past few years where frankly I’m appalled by the current state of all the political parties.
Appalled
Even if the candidates are all shite, it seems sensible to cast your vote for the least shitty of them.
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Thank you!
Yeah that’s what I do.
It seems those that want to be in power are the worst suited to be in power…
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Trust chief executive tells sky : “It is not enough. We won’t even be standing still at that level.” And on £350m for this winter: “If Id known six months ago it might have helped. But we’re days from the winter peak.”
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I’ve been going through the figures a bit. I note with some surprise that the Chancellor is talking about selling down our share in RBS to ‘help balance the books’ over the next few years. IIRC RBS trades at under £3 (might be around 2.80, but I can’t look it up) but we bought RBS at £5. We, the fucking taxpayers, are going to lose more than £2 per share on that sell-off. I’m guessing that the loss will be in the tens of billions of pounds. Lovely if you have the cash to snap up the shares at current prices (which may go south at the announcement of the sell-off).
My inner tax-payer says:
My inner investor says:
For a 5-10 year prospect with decent returns.
EDIT: The OBR says the loss on RBS will be £26.2 Billion! and RBS is £2.70 ish
Currently 270.8p
Thanks, see my edit above. £26 Billion loss to the taxpayer. That is a massive transfer of wealth and control.
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company car Mondeo man. The bloody Tories have got them believing they are the well off in society
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Unless it’s a diesel Mondeo. Then they’ll pay more tax. 
They drive Audis these days don’t ya know.
Politics Rhinehart style?
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From Robert Peston on FB…
This is what you need to know about a budget which I broadly see as a Brexit budget.
First, what were its priorities? Well these are revealed by the biggest spending commitments.
For the next financial year, 2018/19, they are
£2.32bn for current and capital spending in the NHS - which is less than was wanted by its boss in England Simon Stevens but better than an ice-cold enema;
£1.5bn to prepare for Brexit - to soothe the nerves of Tory Brexiteering ultras;
£840m for the fuel duty freeze (as ever, yawn, cough);
£560m for stamp duty relief for first-time buyers on purchases up to £300,000 - which means young people will be marginally less indebted if they can afford to buy an inflated property at all;
£300m for softening the short term financial pain for poorer households when they move to universal credit;
£225m to freeze alcohol duties (burp).You tell me if they are your priorities.
As for what an official described as the “hotch-potch” of measures to stimulate house building from the current rate of just over 200,000 units a year to 300,000, they don’t really kick in till the following year - when there’ll be about £1.2bn of help for local authorities, smaller house builders and housing associations.
On the tax side of the equation, there is nothing big or bold. There’s a small stealth tax on companies, from a freeze in indexation allowances. And a nod at a possible future reduction in the threshold at which small businesses pay VAT (10 Downing Street seems to have killed the Treasury’s hope of significantly increasing the numbers paying VAT, for fear of sparking a parliamentary revolt).
So the biggish politics is that there will be a £6bn stimulus in the year before Brexit and £10bn in the year after Brexit - to support growth that the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts to be horribly lacklustre.
In fact the single most striking disclosure in the budget is how gloomy the OBR has become about how little output-per-worker and per-hour-worked will improve in years to come - which means growth in the economy, wages and living-standards will all remain anaemic.
So two other points about the Treasury and the Chancellor - which are good and bad for them.
The good is that over the next five years there will be a significant shift in public-sector expenditure away from day-to-day spending and towards towards investment - which should eventually improve productivity.
Let’s hope.
The less good is that the forecast fall in debt as a share of GDP from a peak of 86.5% this year has little to do with government efficiency, & everything to do with promised sales (at a blinkin’ loss) of RBS shares & the reclassification of housing association debt so that it drops off the public-sector balance sheet.
Or to put it another way, anyone worried that the public finances will not comfortably or painlessly absorb the impact of another great economic shock - which will hit us one day - will see this budget as a bit head-in-sand.
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Never understood anyone voting Tory. They ALWAYS fuck the public services no exception. Tory voters are either rich enough so it doesn’t matter of they just don’t don’t give a shit about the people in the country. Or they’re just thick shits.
Many people have a problem with redistribution of wealth when it’s suggested from a left perspective. Same people happily ignore the fact that the cunting tories do it every time they’re in power. But they obviously do it from bottom to top.
All the tired excuses:
Politics of envy
Work harder
Low tax is better for the economy
blah fucking blah blah
Don’t wash anymore. Using the banking crisis of 07/08 as their excuse we’ve had 7years of cunting tories fucking the people of this country dry in the arse.
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Or,
D: All of the above.
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Or they lived through the 70’s, or read about it in detail and have judged that the current Labour offering would take us back to then.
I was in the Army then, saw friends blown up, was in a coach 2 behind those blown up at Catterick by the IRA and watched Corbyn entertaining Jerry Adams.
Corbyn and Co will never get my vote.
Edit - and my mate Corporal Roy Bright and his horse were killed at Hyde Park.
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Typical cunting tory behaviour. And they have the fucking bare faced gall to call Labour fiscally irresponsible.
Cunts, every single one of them and the fuckwhits who voted for them.
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“stop spending on trident/eurofighter/carrier/some other big defence programme”
Everyone always says that, but if you stop funding those programmes you’ll have thousands of people out of work you now need to pay for, and since most defence projects are UK staff, a big chunk of the cost comes straight back in as tax, and most of the rest will be spent in the UK so the govt get most of that back too, so those programmes aren’t as expensive as they look. Yes you can stop Trident etc, but you need a plan for what to do with all the people that work on them before you turn off the tap.
I wouldn’t suggest total disarmament by any means but I see no value in nukes.
The majority of the money for nukes goes straight to the USA and we don’t even have unilateral authority to use them. All rather pointless.
Instead of cutting the conventional forces to the bone whereby we can’t properly fulfill our commitments we could properly fund the armed forces, afford aircraft for the carriers we have built and still have an enormous amount of money to fund the NHS, housing and social care.
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