love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

R is now estimated at 1.3 in London, that’s going well then
― stet, Sunday, July 12, 2020 6:23 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

We want to see more people back at work on the shop floor, in the office, wherever they can be.

“Of course we’re not calling for tax rises at the start of the worst recession in 300 years,” says Wes Streeting on a wealth tax on @timesradio. Decent model answer to this q that others in Labour have struggled to give.

— Patrick Maguire (@patrickkmaguire) July 12, 2020

Another fine member of the current Starmer shadow cabinet expanding further than Reeves did on the "big question" for the Labour Party of raising taxes on high earners.

shave your 'beard' patrick you fud

Why are Labour even talking to Times Radio? The stupid fucks. Well the leader does set a bad example

An unbelievably shit thing for Streeting to say. Oh don't let's beastly to the billionaires.

no it's a 'decent model answer' user nashwan

The other thing about Rachel Reeves is she's got a horrible voice, bring back Barry Gardiner!

Tbh I think obfuscating here is the right call, you don't want journalists to be able to bounce you into making policy announcements on the hoof and that was a blunder from Streeting. In general you want the Tories to go for tax rises first and Johnson tellingly is refusing to rule them out.

Even left-wing economists tend to believe you don't raise taxes or cut spending during a recession. In any case talking about tax rises now is falling into the 'how will you pay for it?' trap, which is the same one used to justify austerity. The Bank of England are currently printing hundreds of billions of pounds and borrowing is basically free, in fact in some cases investors are paying the government to take their money. This is all ridiculously premature even without considering the timing of the next election.

If you're going to raise money during a recession then taxing wealth is better than taxing income admittedly.

you are always saying don't fight previous election battles but think the 2015 style obfuscation that paralysed miliband labour and made it such a grotesque embarrassment will work this time. I don't think it will and would put money on it not working - if i had any!

if they are just going to keep reacting to the Tories in such a lukewarm fashion then they are doomed. They shouldn't even need to think about raising taxes on the 80k+ earners, the answer should be of course we fucking will but I can't be too specific now. You can't just keep obfuscating for months or years with the vague promise that your manifesto should be trusted because of the brand name.

am suffering insomnia to the point I've just gone out to clean some bird shit off my bin, and then I'm a watching a 2014 youtube of brillo pad interviewing Reeves and realising she is some kind of demon and mili-labour are even worse than I remembered them. And she is actually more horrible than I thought at the time, when I thought she was just a despicable Blairite, rather than pure evil. I think whoever decided she would a grand choice as shadow DWP really ought to be executed.

Former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron has accepted donations worth nearly £75,000 from an organisation whose director tweeted an article protesting against plans to outlaw gay conversion therapy.

Dr David Landrum also said Gillette had “lost my custom after the trans shaving ad”.

Tim Farron taking big money from dodgy right-wing christian fundamentalist bigots is it? Yesterday I was looking at some Britain Elects approval ratings and the odds on fave to be next LibDem leader Davey is on 14 points which is 7 lower than Farage!

Maybe obfuscation is the wrong word, just bat the question away, no one will give a shit because no one seriously expects an opposition party to have a worked out tax policy this early in a parliament let alone this early in a global public health and economic emergency.

Labour should be the party of raising taxes for high earners and Starmer pledged to maintain the redistributive agenda of the Corbyn manifesto, this shouldn't even be something that is up for discussion imo, but they aren't trying to get my vote anymore!

If Starmer is just going to be running scared shitless of not getting arselicking puff-pieces by the Graun or the right wing press reluctently calling him a grownup for the next 4 years, he might as well just pack in now because his destination is abject failure and a much bigger arsekicking than '15 or '19.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jul/13/super-rich-call-for-higher-taxes-on-wealthy-to-pay-for-covid-19-recovery?CMP

Looks like Wes gone off-message here if the Starmer quote is anything to go by. As for the rest of it, I'll believe it when I see it.

Also how on earth is Richard Curtis that level of super-rich?

Four Weddings and Blackadder 2 royalties? Fuck knows but I'd rather they supertaxed all his rich friends and excluded him, just so he can't look any smugger than usual!

lol Brian Cox tweeted some ill-informed shite about the paras, loads of amateur history experts pointed out their record consists of abject failure in the theatre of war and being deployed as armed thugs murdering citizens on the streets of Derry. Brian Cox deletes tweet and complains he is within his rights to talk ill-informed shite and fears he might end up in a gulag!

Dodds was talking about a wealth tax last week which, again, Starmer seems open to. That's why Reeves and Streetings' interjections were so odd. At the very least, the message discipline is all over the place.

I'd presume Streeting would say 80k + earners is a grey area for wealth tax, because how far does 80k get you these days?

£80k+ is a tax on yr income rather than the value of your assets and its the latter that's being discussed. A wealth tax is more attractive in a crisis because wealth tends to just sit there accruing more wealth whereas income can be spent to stimulate the economy.

It's also impossible to move, say, a central London property portfolio to an offshore tax haven. There's no way the Tories would even consider a wealth tax unless Cummings is really up for a fight with the party, so it's a relatively safe position for a Labour to take given it would have widespread public support.

Yeah I know the distinction between wealth/income tax, but does Wes is what I'm saying. He often doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

I don't think even he would be against wealth tax if he was pressed.

I used wealth tax in the sense of "wealthy people" my bad!

A wealth tax is what Piketty bangs on about, right? Also this guy, who says there are (theoretically) 174 of your billions of pounds that could be raised through taxing wealth at the same rate as income:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/22/wealth-tax-rise-could-raise-174bn-tackle-covid-19-expert-says

There's a benefit to the right in people not really understanding the difference, but whenever Streeting pulls something like this I assume he's pretending to misunderstand and is on a "millions of voters love McDonald's" tip.

lol Brian Cox tweeted some ill-informed shite about the paras, loads of amateur history experts pointed out their record consists of abject failure in the theatre of war and being deployed as armed thugs murdering citizens on the streets of Derry. Brian Cox deletes tweet and complains he is within his rights to talk ill-informed shite and fears he might end up in a gulag!

Are you talking about D:Ream's ex-keyboard player or the actor from Dundee?

Things can Only get Shitter Brian

Thought as much.

saving privates brian

I don't think his charming gf would repeat that comment she made about utilising progressive eugenics to eliminate trans people from the human race again, just because free speech is under threat from the vile twitter mob!

She’s his wife and she’s got even worse over the time, as you’d expect.

Maybe obfuscation is the wrong word, just bat the question away,

Anything that doesn't sound like you're hiding a body in the basement. The content doesn't even really matter, whats more important is the length of the reply. Long answers are the stock in trade of swindlers

"it is what it is"

this fucking country

How is Keir Starmer doing after 100 days, compared to previous party leaders?

Our exclusive polling from @yougov shows voters rate him:

- similar to Tony Blair
- very different to Jeremy Corbyn.
- more similar to David Cameron & Theresa May than Corbynhttps://t.co/4DAH3DDnd6

— Tamara Cohen (@tamcohen) July 13, 2020

voters otm tho i suppose

'another future is possible', it's just that i, sir keir starmer, will do everything in my power to stop it

If Richard Curtis was to write some execrable NewLabour fanfic comedy he have invented Sir Kieth Starmer

the vote that sucked

This is up to companies in the city to tell the workers they have to come in. And what if they don't and wfh is working really well, what then?

PM urges people working at home to look at coming back to work in a safe way

— Nick Eardley (@nickeardleybbc) July 13, 2020

PM to country: “please come get the rona so pret doesn’t go to the wall”

Our workplace has already emailed us to go “we have no plans to change what we said already”. Feel bad for anyone being forced.

It's commercial rents that they are shitting themselves about. A lot of companies are going to look at the potential cost saving here.

I know from some friends who work for them that several big companies have told their office staff they won't be back until 2021

That's my understanding as well. I would be surprised if the majority of office-based companies were back in the office this year, excluding things like call centres and maybe some IT functions. I doubt there are many who want to see a debilitating rona outbreak among their workforce, possible lawsuits etc. And yeah more than a few will be wondering why they're spending so much on office space right now.

It's especially hard on city centre pubs and restaurants I suspect, especially given vastly reduced tourist numbers (and if those don't come back it'll be because we've got much larger problems than a few restaurants closing down).

Pretty sure a lot of middle/senior management are quite enjoying the thousands of pounds they're no longer spending commuting into London from Surrey or Kent as well.

withdrawal of furlough in october is a car crash waiting to happen

not to mention all those hours saved not pissing about in airports

xp

It's commercial rents that they are shitting themselves about. A lot of companies are going to look at the potential cost saving here.