Labour is betraying women

lol nice try with the ‘all GC are right wing’ trope

you have no idea how women here voted

I certainly didn’t vote Tory

No we didn't. Nice attempt at forced teaming, though.

I stopped listening when the programme fundamentally misrepresented the nature of the conspiracy to defraud offence.

I would not want to comment on cases where I may or may not have information about the case which is not publicly available. I will note the following, however:

• One of the strongest defenses against accusations of fraud is that you were acting openly and were neither dishonest nor deceiving anyone. This can be a significant embarrassment when prosecutions are attempted, only for the prosecutor to discover (sometimes during a trial) that key components of the supposed fraud are lacking.
• Focus and blame on the financial services industry from governments and media does not necessarily take into account that companies in the industry are not just operating within regulatory frameworks set by governments, but sometimes acting in ways which they have been specifically pushed into by governments and regulators.

Ultimately bad outcomes in the macro economy tend to be the produce of bad decisions by government, though they will try to disclaim responsibility.

Let’s be honest. Most of us voted Tory or reform on here. Hopefully Labour will last max 5 years. And then order will resume. Like most are saying, Labour didn’t win, the Tories just lost and if Sunak had waited til now, the election would’ve been in the bag for them.

But at least Beanie Babies were things. You could throw them at something, like your brother.

My kids will use real money to buy things like an electronic hat for a computer avatar in a game.

My partner, who has some "interesting" theories about all of this, is convinced that it's all because of electronic money and this will be the end of civilization. I can't say I am sure he is wrong.

Ah, see I feel I have a handle on this having lived through the great Beanie Babies craze of the late 90s.

Indeed. Fewer wars would help, of course.

I think no one anywhere really knows what to do about this.

It's the same with the refugee issue. No one knows what to do because the current situation isn't working and looks to be worse.

apart from Rwanda nonsense, sounding like the Tories on asylum seekers.

They're interested in Albania for processing I think. I'm sure it was reported he spoke to Meloni about that.

They're no different. Apart from the attacks on pensioners I guess.

I suspect you are right, and I don't feel like I can even claim I think they were wrong as far as it goes, because I don't have a good sense of what the other options might have been.

But for goodness sake, surely they must understand that if they are going to make these kinds of decisions they must not look like it is one rule for the people, and another for the members of the government? If you are cutting winter fuel supplements while wearing "free" thousand pound glasses you should expect to be torn to shreds when you go out among the people.

Make it look at least a bit like they are taking a hit too.

It would go well with the electorate, I just find it hard to imagine Labour not giving priority to men's boners.

Agree. And it's a relatively easy (and cheap) win, compared to getting the NHS on track, CoL crisis, Gaza, climate change, refugee crisis, etc. If the will was there.

Just going back to the original thrust of the thread, it struck me that ironically, if only they could see it, Labour have the opportunity to make that big human rights statement. Make their mark on history.

Women's rights is that issue - Afghanistan, Iran, India, China, sex-trafficking in Europe, pornography, loss of rights to the genderist lobby, MVAWG, girls being raped at school. It's a much easier sell to the electorate than the non-existent oppression of their middle-class chums. (Nothing against the middle classes in general, I count myself as middle class and much societal good has been achieved by middle class people.)

Labour cannot effectively fight MVAWG without naming it "male" or while they count men as women. They can't tackle pornography if sex work is work. They have to pick one - men's privileges or women's rights. They have to set aside their endemic misogyny and do the right thing - the thing that actually needs doing. Fix the real social problem, not the made-up one.

It's never going to happen, of course.

I referred to the public sector pay rises as that is what has given us the highest debt since the 1960s, it wasn't for infrastructure

I also pointed out that increasing pay was a political choice against removing the WFA

If you think Reeves had to be harsh for the markets it didn't actually have to be the WFA, that was the political part. It could have been in the region of public sector pay rises instead.

Yes, the 'limitless borrowed cash/inflation' unstoppable force is due to meet the 'rising population' immovable object at some point, surely?

Yes this

Well no, I just don't completely agree and am saying why which is how mn works.

No, that's not what's happened here. I put forward an argument and explained why I thought that theory might be accurate. I've tried to supply some evidence to it. I've made it clear that these are my relatively tentative opinions.

You've dodged the difficult question I asked — why are you holding Labour to account for the public sector pay rises of the last 15 years of Tory rule —and just lobbed a number of single-sentence statements at me.

Give me some joined-up thinking and who knows, I may agree with you. But if you want me to debate with you you'll need to do better than random observations. How about starting with:

What would you do to halt the cost of public sector wages — and more importantly, public sector pensions? Why do you think the Tories didn't do this over the last 15 years?

It's got very strong vibes of Cameron and Osborne in 2010 asking us to accept austerity while repeating "long term economic plan" until they were blue in the face.

The thing is, they prepared voters for that before the election. Labour got through the election saying very little about their plans and leading the voters to believe that they'd make things better just by being competent.

Everyone knew finances would be very tight; I don't think anyone believes Reeves got a look at the books and suddenly discovered a massive black hole. It's not the doom and gloom they'll be punished for, it's that sunny optimism before the election and doom and gloom immediately afterwards makes it look like they've pulled a fast one.

None of which alters the fact that on this finite planet with finite resources, this chimera of 'economic growth' is not sustainable. But that doesn't even seem to interest many politicians.

Businesses have also called out Labour for the gloom. They do actually need investment and it doesn't help.

And maybe they can bash people for a while and get through it, but that comes down to having policies that promote growth.

That's a fair point; starting with the bad news and then uplifting people with the promise of better times ahead seems to make sense. And perhaps nobody would have bought a sudden swerve into sunlit uplands. The narrative asks for a period of gruelling toughness as a consequence of Tory failures.

But.

It's also gambling with the emotions of a populace that has had several years of extreme upheaval and uncertainty and is facing a globally very unsettled and potentially threatening time. Piling gloom onto a stressed and impoverished population is risking more civil unrest and that could fuel more populist sentiment. It's also setting the initial opening tone for the government, and that can be hard to recover from/change.