like the queen this thread will never die: in which we ALL resign (ourselves to disgusting miseries to post-boris politics 2022)

Kwasi Kwarteng attended a private champagne reception hours after delivering his mini-budget where hedge fund managers who would gain from a crash in the pound egged him on to commit to his plans.

The chancellor also gave guests insights about forthcoming government spending cuts during the event, which took place at the Chelsea home of Andrew Law, a financier and Conservative Party donor, on the evening of Friday, September 23.

at this point there is a lot of yeah whatever in response to this latest Pogrund "scoop" because who even gives a fuck anymore?

"The chancellor also gave guests insights about forthcoming government spending cuts during the event".

[Bond villain cackle]

Truss, a) asked Biden to bring down global energy prices.

b) She then asked Biden to enforce a total cutoff of all Russian oil exports.

Even Biden perceived that the requests were oxymoronic since Putin’s success in exporting large quantities of oil have been keeping a lid on the price of crude, which would undoubtedly soar if “Urals crude” vanished from world markets, thus further tanking the British economy, along with Truss’ political fortunes and, more importantly, Democratic prospects in the midterms.

Following the meeting he told aides that the new British leader was “really dumb” and not to be treated seriously.

acting braindead on the world stage to own the libs!

One of the few areas where Joe Biden is in agreement with Sergei Lavrov.

It's not supposed to work this way, we're supposed to laugh up our sleeves at how dumb US presidents are not the other way around.

Business model latest

Best month ever for @novaramedia on YouTube CONFIRMED.

5.4 million views in September.

You can support our work here. @michaeljswalker alone deserves 10 million (and the rest)! 😉https://t.co/quePr80otb

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 2, 2022

i'm sure there's no connection between that and the recent soft-soaping of Kieth and Pals

Everyone in the Novara discussion from a few days ago surely knows they have been able to pay staff for at least a couple of years now. No one disputes they are successful on those terms.

Peter Stefanovic! 40 MILLION VIEWS!!! yeah baby that's how you bring down capitalism!

I don't watch any Novara videos but if they were saying Kieth's shitty PFI green energy plan was good then they don't deserve a penny

Don't you know he bought down Johnson? xp

lol thanks but no thanks Pete

I thought the Truss team might have done a better job of managing her brainlessness and advanced detachment from reality, but they are probably just as bad as her.

I'm not sure there's ever been a world leader as awful at doing media as Truss. Theresa May is a charismatic genius by comparison.

The one genuinely compelling and intriguing thing about Truss in interview is her recourse to silence.

She genuinely waits after a question, says nothing, dead air.

This could actually, in theory, convey thoughtfulness, a refusal to give a glib politician's answer.

In her case it probably doesn't, though I do think it's conceivable that she is genuinely thinking, during the silences, trying to understand what has been asked, realising she can't answer it, then giving a mostly irrelevant response, after a while.

I would say something like "she is the Pinteresque PM, who makes drama from unexplained pauses" but some tedious Sunday columnist has probably already flogged this idea and been paid for it.

I suspect that handlers will try to stop her being silent. I regret this as it is, clearly, one of my favourite things about her.

This is the road Novara is on now.

This is Rawnsley today and it perfectly spells out everything I despise about Labour, a party standing on the decks of a ship that is not so much sinking as disintegrating rapidly around them, and proudly making a virtue out of promises not to rock the boat. pic.twitter.com/TCGTGu9Aex

— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) October 2, 2022

I will grudgingly admit May was sort of charismatic in an oddball way. But most importantly, even in Maybot mode you still got the sense that there was a thinking sentient being behind this very wooden public persona.

We're all in this together, hence the polling.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/02/uk-house-buyers-left-powerless-as-mortgage-deals-hang-in-balance

The City business partner of Jacob Rees-Mogg has been handed a peerage and job as a senior minister by Liz Truss’s government in a move likely to trigger accusations of cronyism.

More big DGAF energy

xp was reading this and we are just starting a new term today on a rate negotiated a couple of months back - were we doing so now it’d be at least twice our revised rate. We’re lucky.

Well what a surprise (!) and to all those who were sneering at gay & bi men something about “her previous voting record doesn’t affect her ability to be health secretary”: fuck you https://t.co/LcmeTEgCz0

— MARCUS. 🇧🇧🏳️‍🌈 (@marcusjdl) October 2, 2022

it sounds like the 45p tax cut is about to be junked

Feeling is this is for what will get her through Tory conference.

They need to come up with a package that will calm the markets and stop the housing market from going down in flames.

"We get it" and "It was becoming a distraction" are the two messages for today.

just a bit of a messaging issue that required £65 billion of QE and funked the mortgage market and the pound, yeah carry on lads

It's laughable how they think they can all say exactly the same thing, use exactly the same language, and that'll be a job well done.

they're getting away with it though, again and again and again. The "scoop" about the champagne lunch has been met with a shrug because this is just how it is now

45p hardly a high top rate of tax anyway tbpfh

It's just headline stuff. It will get them through the week.

If mortgages stabilize I expect the polling to go back to hung parliament. It's a big if though.

The top tax rate was 91% in the US - the US! - until 1964

slightly different subject but there's a great clip going around of david graeber explaining why massive, redistributionist tax policy is actually the best way to stimulate corporate investment. you guys probably clocked this all along but somehow it only just sank in for me with the graeber clip. low corporate tax rates mean companies can just pocket their profits. they sit on them, or hand them out as dividends, whatever. but if you know the tax man's going to take all of that, you find other things to do with it. you spend it on R&D. you pay your workers better. you spend more on brilliant PR. so fucking simple but somehow i just never put 2 and 2 together. it goes a long way towards explaining why american industry was so productive and inventive in those days.

This is not over.

Instant response to the change of mind on the 45p rate in money markets.
Traders no longer pricing in 6% interest rates by next year. Now somewhere between 5.5% and 5.75% pic.twitter.com/WNXbWsbo0a

— Ed Conway (@EdConwaySky) October 3, 2022

Kwarteng confirms further cuts of up to £18bn for public services 🚨 https://t.co/V2WAYxHOa6

— The Independent (@Independent) October 3, 2022

(the "it's one for you, nineteen for me" line in the Beatles taxman is about the 95% tax for the super-rich at the time)

Tory cunts

Kwarteng confirms further cuts of up to £18bn for public services

fuck, i'd missed this. which i suspect was entirely intentional. everybody's talking about the u-turn, which in fact is small potatoes next to this.

ed conway compares this to mitterand whose initial budgets were trashed by the markets and only survived through massive austerity programmes

Guessing that unlike Mitterrand, Truss won't be around for 14 years, or even 14 weeks

Corporation tax cut will cost, you guessed, just over 18bn.

That's it, 18bn us what it's all about.

They won't be able to cut a lot more, so it depends on whether markets have the confidence in that plan.

To go back to the Novara discussion, a left mefia org should be encouraging discussions on how to think about what life could be outside the tyranny of market reaction. But they are too busy with the day-to-day grind of the rest of the media. From a "left" pov. Still, a "success story", well done.

counterpoint:
https://dch81km8r5tow.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cjVUjqJs-958x559.jpeg

i wrote up an underpants-gnome diagram for their business model a couple of days ago, as a rejoinder to pinefox, and realised that this^^^ is the triple question mark

I don't comprehend that statement.

Happy to hear more, possibly in an idiom I can understand.

in the end what i'm saying is that i started to write one kind of joke as pushback and realised that a second kind of joke was beckoning that p much undermined the first one and at that point i gave up (too much explanation needed for either to be "funny" plus the "truths" of the two jokes cancelled each other out)

are my witty contributions helpful?

only very occasionally

are they even witty?

If it's a joke then I don't get it! And neither does PF, it would appear, and I will never be as intellectual as him.

Underpants Gnome Diagram just sounds like three words slung together at random, like it's the name of an indie band from the 90s or something.

tbf (to me) i didn't actually make the joke so i'm not offended that others don't yet find it funny

re Novara I think a simple fact about them is: they are quite young people. All now in their 30s I think.

Many of us do not really share their reference points. At least I, predictably, don't. Others who are older may do. Almost the only thing where I feel I understand their cultural world is soccer - and even there, none of them seems to have much concept of soccer before the 1990s, which is the most important to me.

It therefore doesn't surprise me much that their political views, also, are sometimes different from mine. But still, on many issues, I think they can be informative and illuminating and I can agree.

These thoughts are separate from the "successful business model" question (I think they have one).

underpants gnomes are very googleable. i know it's from South park but don't think I've seen the actual episode

underpants gnomes are very googleable

Maybe so,koogs but it still fails as a joke. My enjoyment of a stand-up gig or TV comedy is severely impaired by the need to tap on my phone constantly to appreciate the humour.

the work i've put into not resembling stand-up or TV comedy is paying off then