Labour isn't Working - Thread 42

[Nuthatch26]

A chat thread for those who don't like this Labour government. 💙☕️

We're gearing up for the Burnham budget. 😬

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

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Poor dogs, it was brutal! Hoping all my tiles are where they should be, a lot of trees down and flooding. Wind gusts hit 80mph late afternoon, but the power stayed on for me at least.

@KathleenDarleenDayKnight to be fair it was nothing like that in my area

But I genuinely thought the dogs looked really sad! I hope everything’s okay with you.

Thank you, I'll check outside tomorrow but so far as I can tell all okay. Just hoping it's not constant all winter.

HMRC sends out letters demanding extensive details about holdings to anyone earning over £200k mol.im/a/16237319 via https://dailym.ai/android

Did you mean this. The thing is wealthy people don't know the answers. Their accountants and lawyers sort it out for them.

There is a real gulf between being a millionaire and earning £200,000 a year.

Is there? I mean depending on your essential costs, if you started from scratch with £200k a year you’d be a millionaire relatively quickly. 10 years?

I have no idea what the tax take is on those earnings, but you know what I mean.

If you are salaried at £200k, you take home £117k after tax & NI. So no, I’m not sure that would make you a millionaire in 10 years, unless your outgoings were very minimal.

Burnham, Mr Say Anything, has repeated his ruling out of an early GE. He said on TV this morning “There is no election coming anytime soon, people may as well put that out of their mind.”

So expect a GE announcement soon.

Can he just stick to something? Annoying if not.

He’s got some NHS strikes coming up, hopefully he’ll focus on those instead.

I will never ever make that kind of money, but just looking at that take home figure makes me feel sad.

Yes will be interesting to see how many people will cross the divide again on Brexit ! How many Tories will vote Labour for another referendum ? Labour vice versa ? Will people be that desperate to get back in ?

Apparntly we are facing hell in a hand cart with all these threats id rather like him to start bloody well focusing on those !

Yep.

😂

I get Iain Dale's newsletter every Sunday and there is often something of interest in it. He is tipping an early election and gives the reasons he should here:

"A good General leads his troops into battle when his opponents are at their weakest. That moment is now. Here are 10 reasons why I think Burnham should call an election for 10 December.

1. The latest ISPSOS/MORI poll shows Labour with an eight point lead, the largest since Burnham became PM. This is more than enough to achieve a solid majority.

1. Reform UK have shed a third of their support over the last year. Soft Reform support is drifting back to the Conservatives, with many people feeling distinctly queasy about the various donation scandals. Only 1 in 5 British adults (19%) believe Reform UK is ready to form the next government —a drop from 22% last month and 29% last September. 62% currently disagree Reform UK are ready (up 2 points from last month).

1. Although the Tories are now firmly in second place, and have the highest poll rating (24%) since July 2024, where they got 23.7 per cent of the vote, the party’s poll ratings fall way behind those of their leader, Kemi Badenoch. As she said in her conference speech, people are giving the shop window a second look, but they are not yet ready to buy. By 2028, they may be, and that’s a risk for Andy Burnham

1. The Conservatives have very few candidates in place and an election called next week would stretch their resources beyond anything they’ve known before if they are to field candidates in every seat.

1. Calling an election now would prevent Reform UK from spending most of the £72 million in donations they have recently received.

1. The Conservatives are cash poor. Although they’ve done far better in raising money than they did after the 1997 election defeat, the coffers are not overfull. It is alleged that Labour is in a similar position, but the unions would no doubt come to Labour’s aid.

1. Following the disasters inflicted on the Greens, largely by themselves, many Labour-Green switchers are returning to the Labour fold.

1. Andy Burnham will never be more popular than he is now. By Christmas the polls will likely have turned, and a May election will soon he ruled out, meaning he would have to rely on a reversal in Labour’s fortunes by 2029.

1. Burnham was a member of Gordon Brown’s cabinet when he funked calling an election in October 2007. It led to him denying him the re-election which was so important for his agenda. This will be playing on Burnham’s mind.

10. Burnham is more of a risk taker than most. The fact that he has ruled out at early election is utterly irrelevant. All prime ministers do that until they actually call one.

Try as I might, I can think of few reasons Burnham would not call an early election. However, there is one, and it’s an important one. Although he would win a majority – I suspect it would be around 50 seats – many of the seats lost would be to Reform UK. Although their support has declined, there’s little doubt that after an election, their parliamentary representation would increase to more than 100. The question is, could they overtake the Conservatives?

The main reason I think Burnham is seriously considering holding an election stems from his party conference speech. It was almost an act of manifesto writing. Virtually every policy he announced could only be enacted after an election, with several of them being impossible due to the commitments made in the 2024 manifesto. As Ed Davey put it, there were a series of ‘definitely maybes’. If he wins a December election all of these policies could start to be enacted in 2027 rather than in the 2030s. I don’t see Andy Burnham as a patient man.

If polling day is to be 10 December, Parliament would need to be dissolved at the latest by 5 November. So, in order to have a clear up few days, the election would need to be announced as early as possible after the budget on Wednesday. If the announcement is to come, I would expect it to come on Saturday or Monday week.
Remember, you heard it here first. But if it doesn’t happen, forget you ever wasted your time reading this!"

@ImNotAsCooperativeAsYouMightWantAWomanToBe oh that’s interesting because it’s not just me then

I’m obviously not paying half as much attention as many people are

I’m under the impression that if they called a general election now, they would win.

editing to add -I realise it could be damaging for many other reasons though.

I have no idea what’s in the budget…. What some posters have said about HNWIs getting letters from HMRC seems to imply laying the groundwork for a wealth tax of some kind. Obviously, a lot of people support that.

Interesting although if he does I don’t see the point in listening to a word he says since it has a shelf life of about a week.

@ImNotAsCooperativeAsYouMightWantAWomanToBe yes very interesting logic

I think it would be terrible to inflict this on us again however !

Stephen Glover in today's mail sums how I feel. If we have this potential war and or catastrophe coming down the tracks what on earth are the gov doing and messing around with crap for ?

Completely agree. Can’t stand Burnham’s showboating.

In that way Burnham is carving out a very dodgy reputation for himself.

It’s one thing to be cynical about all politicians’ promises to bring health, wealth and general happiness to the country. It’s quite another for specific pledges to be made and broken on a whim as Burnham does, just to suit him at the time.

I wonder, for example, what his Makerfield vote would have been if he’d said “We must get close to Europe. I want to re-run the Brexit arguments and campaign to re-join the EU”.

I’d laugh my head off if he lost Makerfield now the voters know he lied to them.

😂

Stats published in the Economist, sound Ministry of Justice.

I definitely thought that speech from AB at the conf begged an announcement of an election too, because his interim policies are KS’s.

i am unsure Dale is factoring in the unpopularity of running on income tax rises though…

He'll avoid actually saying anything about specific rises in his manifesto. It'll just be 'we have to look carefully at what's fair, I'm not going to predict what an uncertain world forces on us'.

And the Left will read that as 'he's going to tax rich people (great!), but not me'

Initially, I thought AB was a bit of a bumbling fool. But actually, short term it works well to brazenly say completely contradictory things. People have a tendency to hear whatever it is they want. Of course, that stops working when you need to actually do something. But it will work long enough for him to call an election. And then he can do whatever the hell he wants, saying that he's got a 'mandate'.

He's already primed us that he will re-enter the EU without a referendum if he gets in. Genuinely shocking that he thinks it's OK to do something that constitutionally significant based on an election win, rather than a referendum - especially when the referendum went the other way just 10 years ago.

The Left have a bad habit of assumeing that whatever they want is necessarily what 'the people' want, because they're the party of the people, innit? So much so that when 'the people' say otherwise, it's just something to shout down and find a way around. Never to actually listen to. For their own good, of course.

Ah of course, he simply needs to not make the same claim as the previous manifesto….might work…