brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

New Kantar poll has CON ahead with LAB down on general election
CON 42
LAB 38
LD 9
UKIP 5
GRN 3
SNP 2

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 21, 2017

Why wouldn't you use weighting informed by 2017 general election @KantarPublic - a masters student wouldn't design polling data like this. Its meaningless. pic.twitter.com/5UMmi1h1co

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) November 21, 2017

(bastani not an entirely disinterested political scientist there, obviously: but an invested pundit who basically called the election better than many some weeks out)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/22/f9/1e/22f91e4f46fe9ea45c926d31dce4e1ad.jpg

l-r (Dacre, Conservative Party, Kantar, Rees-Mogg)

lmao they have 18-24 turnout at *19%* pic.twitter.com/fee8sYE5J0

— Patrick Flynn (@pxtrk) November 21, 2017

this is disgusting @CarolineFlintMP pic.twitter.com/vyEpxm44Ub

— russia hacked my toaster (@multiplebears) November 21, 2017

Flint by no means the worst offender but The Times, supported by the Sun, New Statesman, half of the Guardian, and a bunch of MPs, seems to have decided to bring the trans bathroom debate to this side of the Atlantic - and are lining up on North Carolina’s side.

The repeat offender on R4 I keep hearing is Claire Fox, not just on transgender human rights/equality issues - she is diabolical on everything tbh. She'd get on well with Flint probably. Note to self: Got to stop listening to bad R4 programs.

how does Caroline Flint feel about cis women who "look and sound like a man"? just want to follow where this logic is heading

well obv, they couldn't be allowed to access domestic violence services if they failed the "look and sound like a women" criteria, whatever the fuck that is supposed to be.

Claire Fox is another one of those who needs the Spiked/RCP/"Institute of Ideas" leper's bell rung out prior to any media appearance. No surprise to see her foghorning any old nasty prejudice that's in the wind at a given time.

i uh waht

The main thing missing from #TheSummerThatChangedEverything documentary was when I got bitten by a dog on the first day filming. Didn’t quite fit the narrative maybe?

— Lucy Powell MP (@LucyMPowell) November 20, 2017

dog was a Momentum activist

dogs: naturally left-wing?

part of the silent minority excluded from the Party by old-school politics

but as pack animals, I would say they're instinctively socialist, yes.

cats: naturally anarcho-capitalist?

cats seem to have spent a lot of human history inveigling themselves as a kind of rentier class.

dog - previously the blindly obedient servant of the representatives until they discovered those representatives were supposed to be supporting the dogs!

i saw the budget on mute and corbyn looked like he was feeling his oats

at one point the entire tory front bench erupted with laughter (at part of corbyn's statement i don't know) and may and hammond both were doing the exact same shoulder-shaking, head-back cod-swallowing laugh

We also know what happened next

Xp presumably an actual real Trotskyist running dog of capitalism.

whats this philip hammond "box office" phil bollox

Corbyn screaming at some Tory cunt:

that terrifying moment when you realise you've misjudged the situation badly and pushed the substitute teacher too far https://t.co/roE2Ir3Ryy

— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) November 22, 2017

Plenty of 'hilarious' tweets about the budget including: 1)more dead old people, 2)5.8 bn on brexit so far, 3)As good as it gets and 4)Stamp Duty non-policy.

Has this budget fallen apart yet?

Is there anything controversial enough in it for that? Osbourne would get too cocky and then end up with a backlash + a big hole in the budget but this one looks like 'more of the same, keep your head down, try not to fuck up.'

OTM, 'nothing to see here'.

Cool, I was just wondering whether it was the press not trying to stir stuff up because of the precarious position of this government.

I heard a suggestion that the stamp duty abolition might have the effect of forcing house prices up but I'm underclass rent sector vermin so house buying is a total mystery to me.

He's a naturally conservative chancellor with extremely fragile job prospects in a paralysed and divided government with a massive economic clusterfuck imminent. The main impulse will be "rock the boat as little as possible".

(xpost - it'll definitely push prices up by increasing demand without any corresponding increase in supply. But this government will always favour policies that value demand over supply, it's actually a policy for homeowners pretending to be a policy aimed at helping young people).

when it comes to housing. in every other part of the economy the government resolutely refuses, after 10 years of unprecedentedly low interests rates, to do a damn thing about low demand, even though it would be cheap as chips to do so. and it has wrecked a generation frankly

I expect Tories to be amoral scumbags and only friends to the rich, but these fuckers are economically illiterate as well!

Fuck all about social housing other for all the Grenfell crocodile tears as well.

Or about the treatment of the disabled on benefits. But no-one cares about that anyway.

I heard a suggestion that the stamp duty abolition might have the effect of forcing house prices up but I'm underclass rent sector vermin so house buying is a total mystery to me.

Same here, I've got no idea what stamp duty is.

the income tax allowance rise might be worth a quid a week to me as long as no prices of anything go up during the next year

offset against not having had a pay rise in 5 or 6 years tho

stamp duty is one of the pitifully few taxes on land ownership that exist in the UK fwiw

So this is the comment that got Corbyn riled up:

. @AndrewGriffiths heckled @jeremycorbyn saying ‘you should be in social care’. Toxic, useless and clueless. These people are the dregs. Where do the Tories find them?

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) November 22, 2017

They keep getting away with completely vague commitments to building new social housing, which of course are petri dishes for future Labour voters. Quite a lot of the PLP are just as full of shit as the Cons on that old canard that is Affordable Housing tbf.

I don't think they have it in Scotland? I know the process of buying a house in Scotland is different to the rest of the UK, or England+Wales at least. (xxp)

half of the PLP probably have some direct connect to the housing/renting sector, the same half that are essentially economic neolibs and believe that social housing is anti-aspirational and a throwback to the kind of undereducated vermin that let their dogs bite you while you're out campaigning

Stamp duty is a weird tax that you pay if you buy a house or flat - the (good) assumption is that people buying a place are spending the absolute maximum they can afford, so if they have £100 to spend but they know that the stamp duty will be £5, they can afford a flat for £95. So if you remove the duty they will have £100 to spend on a flat. So the thinking is they'll just buy the same flat for £5 more because the market will inflate by precisely that amount.

Therefore removing this stamp duty will just slightly inflate the price of places at the cheaper end, so existing homeowners profit a bit and the tax take goes down a bit. WIN.

Oh and Stamp Duty doesn't kick in until something like £250000 anyway, which means that even if this does help first-time buyers, it helps first-time buyers who are probably doing pretty well already.

xp Scotland has its own stamp duty.

Loosening the cap on Local Authorities borrowing to build social housing is not *nothing* but it is thin sauce.

isn't that alongside what amounts to the forced privatization of housing associations?

Quite likely - I haven't seen that bit. When I had a little moan at a local councillor who came round canvassing about what was happening to social housing, she said was the inability to borrow forces councils into these unholy partnerships with big developers.

Scotland can opt out of the stamp duty nonsense and presumably will.

Tory hecklers literally crouching behind the benches as they shouted in some cases. Numerous Labour MPs tweeting angrily about their conduct yesterday.

Other notable budget stats

- Deficit not due to be eliminated until 2031 (16 years later than Osborne claimed it would be).
- Growth below 2% in every forecast year for first time in modern history.
- Annual pay not due to return to 2008 peak until 2025.

The end of the world will come sooner than deficit elimination.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPUJW7YX0AA_YF8.jpg

is there a story behind this picture? why on earth would you pose for a photo like this when you're chancellor of the exchequer?

It's puzzling that they put that "pensive chimpanzee" look out there on such an important day for him.

There's very little merit in completely eliminating the deficit anyway, unless you want to destroy the gilts market and with it the safest place for pension funds to put money.