Bye bye Starmer

[Beany]

It's still a bar.

[Jobbo]

Simon Williams, Media Analyst tells me it's a more trustworthy a source than GB News!

Even GB News are reporting it! https://www.gbnews.com/news/keir-starme ... e-election

[Beany]

Yeah, that it was on GB News was a core part of the joke:

Reform voter Derek Williams told us, “It’s like I’ve always said, Labour are a soft touch who would rather give houses to terrorists arriving on small boats than help homeless veterans, so it’s quite difficult for me to reconcile them spending £3.5m to combat veteran homelessness while also deporting 10,000 illegal immigrants.

“I can only assume it’s all a lie to cover up what’s really going on, but reading about it happening on the GB News website was very strange. I can only assume they’ve been hacked.”

Meanwhile, non-morons have been explaining to people like Derek that the Tory party has spent many years artificially creating an issue in order to make you angry about, and to secure your vote to fix it.

[Jobbo]

Ah, sorry - I don't actually read Newsthump because it's not funny.

[Mito Man]

Scrapping the old military hardware is interesting. Seems a lot like the future of warfare will be drone based with nukes a useful deterrent for keeping things from getting too ...messy. You'd think if you're not going to invade another country, and perhaps with NATO going to shit, maybe you'd be better off just maintaining nukes and making an iron dome system and have a swarm of drones circling UK waters?

[RobYob]

Scrapping the old military hardware is interesting. Seems a lot like the future of warfare will be drone based with nukes a useful deterrent for keeping things from getting too ...messy. You'd think if you're not going to invade another country, and perhaps with NATO going to shit, maybe you'd be better off just maintaining nukes and making an iron dome system and have a swarm of drones circling UK waters?

Doesn't seem like the UK is interested in being a defence turtle though, still keeping the two aircraft carriers for power projection and as an island sea power is still potentially quite important.

Drone based defence gets interesting once "autonomy" is cracked. At that point they're useful even in a communication denied envirnoment. But I can certainly imagine near future warships packing containers full of drones for a whole bunch of tasks.

[ZedLeg]

This is an interesting statistic from this thread

https://x.com/tomabacon/status/1859385352886362192?s=46

IMG_2363.jpeg (280.53 KiB) Viewed 1556 times

Looks like it’s a similar case to salary where a small amount of unrepresentative people at the top are skewing the figures for everyone.

[Broccers]

I'm sat looking at you lot gradually acknowledging your labour government is absolutely fucking awful

[Jobbo]

I don’t think that’s borne out at all, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.

[GG.]

No it truly is objectively bad.

But for the fact that LDI investments have largely been wound off by pension funds, this budget would have had a similar effect to the truss mini budget (at least from the linkedin posts I saw of experts with Maths degrees from Oxford that work managing LDI and to whom I think it would probably be right to defer!) Here's a good article for anyone that wants to read about it: https://www.portfolio-institutional.co. ... ye-to-ldi/

Yields on 10 year gilts spiking towards 5% and inflation now back up above target due to big borrowing and inflationary spending - all within a few months, plus a few extra dead old people over winter to boot. Maybe RR can dig herself a big enough black hole to disappear into it and never be seen again. One can only hope.

[Rich B]

To be fair, it’s pretty laughable listening to the Tories slamming into labour about high inflation (currently 2.3% against a target of 2%) when it reached 11.1% under their leadership.

Like most of the Tory press, they’re really struggling to drum up the smear stories about labour. So far the best they’ve managed is Starmer correctly reported some gifts and Reeves said in an interview that she’d been at the BoE for a few years longer than it stated on her LinkedIn page.

It’s a pretty fucking long way away from Boris’s illegal parogatiom of parliament, Zahawis multi million tax dodges, Mones dodgy PPE rip off, Boris’s parties, Boris appointing sex pests, etc…

i expect they’ll be calls from the papers for labour to step down when we find out a back bencher let their 14 year old child watch a 15 film next…

[Simon]

This is an interesting statistic from this thread

https://x.com/tomabacon/status/1859385352886362192?s=46

IMG_2363.jpeg

Looks like it’s a similar case to salary where a small amount of unrepresentative people at the top are skewing the figures for everyone.

That is interesting, and if accurate clearly shows that there's an issue to be addressed. However, I don't believe the changes will deal with it, as farmland is still less IHT'able that other investments. Two fixes:

1) Abolish IHT altogether
2) At least amend the rule so that tax is only payable if it's sold 'out of family' after a death. That way genuine farmers will be protected as they'll continue to farm the land.

By the way, for the purposes of this thread, Clarkson IS now a farmer. He freely admits he bought the farm to avoid IHT but he is very clearly trying to make a successful farm out of it, despite various obstacles along the way. I can't comment about Dyson et al because I don't know the details of their farms.

[Simon]

To be fair, it’s pretty laughable listening to the Tories slamming into labour about high inflation (currently 2.3% against a target of 2%) when it reached 11.1% under their leadership.

Like most of the Tory press, they’re really struggling to drum up the smear stories about labour. So far the best they’ve managed is Starmer correctly reported some gifts and Reeves said in an interview that she’d been at the BoE for a few years longer than it stated on her LinkedIn page.

It’s a pretty fucking long way away from Boris’s illegal parogatiom of parliament, Zahawis multi million tax dodges, Mones dodgy PPE rip off, Boris’s parties, Boris appointing sex pests, etc…

i expect they’ll be calls from the papers for labour to step down when we find out a back bencher let their 14 year old child watch a 15 film next…

But, to play devils advocate, almost everywhere suffered high inflation, driven largely by high energy prices after Putin invaded Ukraine. Reeves budget IS inflationary in and of itself.

[ZedLeg]

I still don’t understand how you get from a minority are taking the piss with a loophole to just get rid of the tax. Apart from your personal animosity for it obviously

If the government’s numbers are right then it’s clear that there is a problem as you say and that the government’s idea should resolve that specific issue to some degree.

As I mentioned in the protest thread and several of the posted items have said, farming has much bigger problems than iht but beyond measures like centrally mandated minimum pricing for produce I (the large scale farming expert, obviously) don’t have any ideas.

[Jobbo]

If you abolish IHT you end up inevitably having to suffer a CGT charge on death - currently death wipes out capital gains, which is right because IHT is charged.

It’s an utterly specious argument because iHT is never going to be abolished anyway. Unfortunately I think a number of commentators are correct: farm land is still taxed less than other assets so is still a good IHT mitigation.

[Broccers]

So you lot are happy with IHT and its threshold being frozen at 325k since Aprild 2009? That's the problem with this tax - it catches too many people because it's set too low.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... rest-rates

[mik]

So you lot are happy with IHT and its threshold being frozen at 325k since Aprild 2009? That's the problem with this tax - it catches too many people because it's set too low.

If we assume that it's not going away, it does seem really stupid that it isn't index linked.

IHT on >£325k in 2009 would be the equivalent of IHT on > £545k today......

[ZedLeg]

Again with this complete lack of touch with reality. according to gov figures 4% of estates pay inheritance tax, because £325k is a lot of money.

[Rich B]

So you lot are happy with IHT and its threshold being frozen at 325k since Aprild 2009? That's the problem with this tax - it catches too many people because it's set too low.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... rest-rates

There'll be lots of things that i would prefer changed to benefit me and plenty more i think aren’t fair to all, but how do they get paid for when the countries already been bled dry and services are fucked?

With these thresholds, you're talking like this is a new tax/regime that labour have brought in, but the last 14 years of Tory gov didn’t change this threshold either.

[ZedLeg]

It’s fun that even though I don’t see broccers posts I can catch up with them in the quotes