The all-new shiny cockpunch thread (Part 2)

Yep; my first thought was:

You want Reform Plc im Government? This is how you get Reform Plc in government. :man_facepalming::man_facepalming::man_facepalming:

Think there’s more to that story and it is being presented to look bad, I read it that she was selling the house and gave the tenants 4 months notice. They were on a short term lease which only requires 2 months notice of termination. The house didn’t sell so she put it back out to rent.

Notwithstanding how poor this is, never mind the optics, what the hell are the ministerial vetting team at Labour doing approving a *landlord* as the homelessness minister?

Just mind-bogglingly sloppy, lads.

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This is kinda what I was driving at. Who the fuck is advising these people?

They are rather-too-plainly just making it up as they go along… :roll_eyes:

They were a party desperately in need of a good spindoctoring team.

I say ‘were’ because it’s already too late for them. They could find a cure for death and give everyone in Britain a million pounds, a lollypop, and a puppy, and Reform will still landslide it at the next election…

fucksake

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Yebbut, they really, really, beyond anybody’s worst nightmare really have royally fucked things up. Both Tory and Labour are dead in the water and they only have themselves to blame. Labour have been so very disappointing. They don’t deserve another term.

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Still. At least they’ve got a top ‘Comms’ man on the case now. FFS.

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That will end in tears (or prison).

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That’s the whole of Liverpool voting reform then, this govt is aiming for Truss levels of ineptitude :roll_eyes:

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Presumably bought onboard for his phone-tapping skills?

Given he’s stil COO of Murdoch-owned / Rebekah Brooks-helmed ‘News UK’ - publishers of The Sun and The Times amongst other right-wing propaganda-glands, this seems somewhere between suicidal and an open declaration of Labour’s wholehearted shift to the political right-of-centre.

Love to be a fly-on-the-wall in various union boardrooms right now… :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Worked for Tony Blair

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We don’t really have democracy and representative governments anymore, red or blue is immaterial.

Governments have been replaced by corporate mouthpieces for the rich to stay rich/ get even richer while the country is run into the ground for the rest of us to squabble amongst ourselves and find distracting scapegoats for (‘boat people’, boomers, the disabled etc).

As long as the London playground for the very richest continues to provide restaurants and other entertainment that only they can afford, super car dealerships, multi million pound homes etc then governments will keep propping up and enabling their lifestyles whilst allowing our Iibraries to shut, roads to deteriorate, hospitals, schools and universities to fall down whilst trapped in artificial debt, and so on and so on.

The oligarchs own us and they own the only people that could have saved us from the rich - the government, who are both financially broke and therefore beholden to the rich for funding, and riddled with stooges sent from the rich to tell them what to do and what not to do.

If Starmer does exactly as he’s told, doesn’t rock the boat, then when he leaves he can bank £10m in his first year out of office just like Johnson, Blair etc.

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I’ve been watching a lot of Gary Stevenson recently and this popped up to challenge the assertion that the Government/country is broke.

I am no economist, but my view of this was that the ability to create money always has a cost to it, in that is causes inflation, so the more you create the less it is worth. However the assertion here is that this can be controlled through bonds. That’s the bit I don’t get.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvRueM6wBgobwTT4ATvJjsf8OO6S7wD10&si=RD6KTKd-0WEdvgfk

This is a slightly more evolved version of what Richard Murphy has been on about for years. Like you I am very very sceptical of it avoiding inflation because good old QE which was supposed to be a closed cycle process that had no effect on the wider economy still had inflationary effects so anything that isn’t closed cycle, bonds or not, pretty much definitely will.

I have to admit that my time for Stevenson is limited. His automatic answer to how to make wealth taxes stick in a global sense that ‘he doesn’t do international relations’ is a cop out. We’d give no time to an enviromentalist who’s ‘simple’ answer to issues around climate change is to crack stable nuclear fusion so I’m not too engaged with someone who’s basic answer to an equally challenging issue ‘simply’ needs a quantum revision to how international relations works but gives no hint as to how to do it.

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Ah, the magic money tree theory of everything in mainstream economics is wrong and that all we have to do is print money into existence and voila no black hole, no cost of borrowing, proper funding of public services and funding of full employment. Sound too good to be true…?

Does creating money cause inflation - yes somewhere in the economy, depending on where you put it in. If you give it to people who have lower disposable income then it’s more likely to inflate the cost of the things they consume.

Whereas if you create money by buying bonds then this has the impact of increasing asset prices as the wealthier institutions will be off competing for assets rather than consuming more stuff. Remember 2008 and Covid where the richest enjoyed the biggest dividend from QE.

The instruments for controlling this inflationary force are the usual suspects - interest rates and taxation which will need to be commensurate with how much money is injected into the economy. I think but don’t really know, that this is why Richard Murphy obsessively tries to assert that governments spend then tax, rather than tax then spend, but I don’t know enough to see in practice why this would be very different.

I’m guessing what all the competing theories rely upon to work to a large extent is real economic growth which would offset the inflationary pressure and also create revenues to balance the books. The problem here to my eyes is that the UK is structurally very weak post industrialisation and now post Brexit so I don’t know which sectors of the economy offer much real growth potential to respond to this kind of stimulus.

The bit where I do agree with both Gary S & Richard M is that growing inequality and wealth hoarding by the very richest damages the rest of us both economically and democratically. For wealth to be redistributed they need to be taxed at a much greater rate, and that this is feasible despite the noise and fear mongering that surrounds this suggestion - ie the wealthiest will leave and this will be a disaster etc. I suspect it isn’t so much about the feasibility of taxing wealth as it is the lack of will to even try to do so, especially if that is the background you come from or where your political backing comes from.

To my mind these families are not entrepreneurs and wealth creators, they’re wealth hoarders and controllers of assets. The impact of them leaving won’t result in the sky falling down or the economy crashing despite what their paid stooges in the press would try to tell you.

Most of these arguments and also the distractions like finger pointing and blaming scapegoats, trying to turn the poor and against the ‘middle class’ and vice versa are just more wealthy sponsored divide and conquer tactics.

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Calling Olan @htm_1968

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Sounds a bit like pinkfishonomics.

You and me alike then. I’m certainly not an economist but I suspect wealth taxes are ‘notoriously difficult to make work in practice’ for a bunch of reasons.

Meh

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Oliday innit

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