Badenoch's (Lack Of) Vision Quest

[Psamathe]

Maybe i'm getting a bit lefty in my old age but I can't help think that energies would be better spent on sorting out the £800m lost to Tax avoidance, and the £59.2 billion in the tax gap. About 40 billion of that is criminal behaviour and failure to take reasonable care.

Or treating all those off-work long term sick so they can get off benefits, back into work, paying tax, increasing national productivity, contribute to "growth", etc.

 

[icowden]

Or treating all those off-work long term sick so they can get off benefits, back into work, paying tax, increasing national productivity, contribute to "growth", etc.

Because they are just lying around malingering and not being treated as opposed to having serious medical conditions which mean they are off long term sick?

 

[Pross]

I like this bit:


Maybe i'm getting a bit lefty in my old age but I can't help think that energies would be better spent on sorting out the £800m lost to Tax avoidance, and the £59.2 billion in the tax gap. About 40 billion of that is criminal behaviour and failure to take reasonable care.

A 2% wealth tax on households with more than £100 million in wealth would raise £10 billion and affect less than 1000 households, all of whom can afford it.

But no, lets go after 350,000 people who can't afford it just because they might like to smoke a fag or have a few beers as an escape from their daily grind.

But they will all leave the country or something like that.

That said her ‘policy’ announcement today is likely to play well with voters as you’ll regularly hear people moaning about “their” taxes being spent by benefit scroungers on cigarettes and booze. It’s quite an understandable trigger I guess.

 

[Beebo]

People prefer to kick the people below them rather than above them.
It’s tragic that someone whose life is so bad that they live on benefits can’t have the dignity to spend the money as they wish.

 

[Pblakeney]

Or condoms. People on benefits shouldn't have any fun at all.

I consider those two sentences to be contradictory.

 

[First Aspect]

I consider those two sentences to be contradictory.

True. We dont want them breeding. Just make things worse.

 

[briantrumpet]

That's odd. Last year in the Commons, Tugendhat said the triple lock wasn't affordable, but now the Tories are all for it. I guess that Rachel Reeves must have put the nation's finances on a much better footing than the Tories left them in.

 

[Pross]

Her interview on the prisoner release scheme was another cringeworthy talking down at the viewers again. The interviewer made the point that the Tories started the scheme but to paraphrase ‘they were nice, fluffy criminals not big, bad, nasty ones like Labour are releasing’ and when asked what the Tories would be doing it was ‘we can’t say but it will be good stuff, pinkie promise’. Unfortunately she wasn’t grilled on why they hadn’t built the necessary prison places to avoid early release being required.

 

[Beebo]

Her interview on the prisoner release scheme was another cringeworthy talking down at the viewers again. The interviewer made the point that the Tories started the scheme but to paraphrase ‘they were nice, fluffy criminals not big, bad, nasty ones like Labour are releasing’ and when asked what the Tories would be doing it was ‘we can’t say but it will be good stuff, pinkie promise’. Unfortunately she wasn’t grilled on why they hadn’t built the necessary prison places to avoid early release being required.

It’s very easy being in opposition.
It would be nice if people realised how hard it actually is to be making the decisions.

 

[Pblakeney]

It’s very easy being in opposition.
It would be nice if people realised how hard it actually is to be making the decisions.

Those who have been in the position of making the decisions in the past should be the ones most acutely aware of this.

 

[briantrumpet]

It's a pity that the journalists from Byline Times won't be there.

They've been banned from the conference.

 

[C R]

It's a pity that the journalists from Byline Times won't be there.

They've been banned from the conference.

View attachment 17554

Things like these are the reason I stopped repairing my irony meter. Reform are defending freeze peach in Derbyshire too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...-reform-uk-council-boycotts-reporter-potholes

 

[Pross]

They’ve now realised they’re hard to take seriously on early release due to their complete failure to build the previously promised prison places when in Government. Their response is that they will definitely build 50,000 new places if we give them another chance (they’re a different Party these days*) and they’ll all be built with 6-7 years. They’re going to bring in new laws to ensure planning gets sorted and apparently prisons can built in a year. They seem to have forgotten the design part completely and think you just turn up with a giant LEGO kit.

* How many Tory MPs are there in Parliament now that weren’t there before 2024?

 

[briantrumpet]

They’ve now realised they’re hard to take seriously on early release due to their complete failure to build the previously promised prison places when in Government. Their response is that they will definitely build 50,000 new places if we give them another chance (they’re a different Party these days*) and they’ll all be built with 6-7 years. They’re going to bring in new laws to ensure planning gets sorted and apparently prisons can built in a year. They seem to have forgotten the design part completely and think you just turn up with a giant LEGO kit.

* How many Tory MPs are there in Parliament now that weren’t there before 2024?

No doubt they'll be streamlining the planning process to prioritise constituencies that contain places such as Piddington, who welcome new faces in their area.

 

[briantrumpet]

A not-totally-damning assessment from Tim Bale, but still not optimistic for Badenoch's Tories.

https://centrewrite.brightblue.org....myth-the-tories-are-still-like-a-weird-uncle/

Putting it bluntly, it is one thing to treat a former leader who won election after election back in the 1970s and 1980s as some kind of icon. It is quite another to allow a frankly myopic and absurdly ahistorical version of the vision and the policies she pursued to become an idée fixe that prevents the party adapting to meet the economic and fiscal challenges of what, too many Tories seem to need reminding, is the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

Just as damaging is the party’s and Badenoch’s increasing tendency towards being ‘extremely online’ and even more Anglospheric than ever. This, and the desperate desire to stem the party’s losses to Reform, has led the party to paint itself into an ‘anti-woke’ corner that, to the majority of Brits who do not spend much time online, just looks a bit weird and obsessive: a bit like that uncle that nobody takes too seriously at family gatherings, especially after he has had a bit to drink.