Ian Boucher

Not to the real world. On here yes. But whilst the public cynically expect tax rises I still think this will go down like a lead balloon across large swathes.

Don’t make employing people more expensive. Then follow that up with a properly linked and funded industrial and skills strategy and a proper plan to build houses not one that focuses only on planning but makes everything else harder.

It’s easy in hindsight to say this I accept that - but budget one big tax rises to pay for public service improvements, avoid welfare cuts and remove two child cap. Alongside fiscal rule changes to improve infrastructure. Create budget headroom and deliver improvements to PS.

And I still don’t sense they have a credible theory of change to deliver in 4 years and people feeling better off, with more disposable income, lower bills and prices etc and faster growth. How do they get from A to B - they never really have answered that.

Have a plan. They’ve lurched about from cuts to fiscal rules to tax rises. They talked growth yet made it more expensive to employ people and reducing the labour pool. Invested in public services whilst talking efficiencies and cuts - so austerity but not austerity. It’s incoherent.

For me they had a slogan of change without ever explaining how they’d pay for it. Then got elected with a big majority and tried to play the Cameron/Osborne trick in month 1 - it failed, and since then lack any economic coherence and even with that accounted for the messaging is bad.

Not pre election. They just had a manifesto with barely any policy in so barely any spending and just kept saying it was fully funded. Would never engage with the whole ‘yes but what about the rest’. It was put to them several times that things are dreadful what’s your plan but they never engaged.

Nah sorry. Reeves had loads of interviews where she was asked about the £18bn of cuts Tories had baked into the budget or the fact that obviously all the things they wanted to do needed more money raising. Every time she ducked it - wouldn’t address it. Pretended it wasn’t happening.

They have to raise taxes but the problem is they are preparing to do so and take a whole load of political pain without a pay off. Where in the and raising taxes will let us do ‘x’. They will do it on the ‘it’s right thing to do long term’ be hammered for it without any sort of horizon of hope.

I don’t think I was expecting charisma. The assessment of the situation and causes were all fine but it’s way too downbeat. The takeaway from that is ‘it’s all horrible you are going to all suffer even more and we know we’ve lost the next election anyway but at least we are helping the next lot’.

I presume because they think it strengthens their case to consolidate the right wing vote block towards reform away from the Tories against a split centre left?

I’d hope the general public weren’t the audience as if they were it was not a good piece of communication at all.

‘Functionally bankrupt’ oh dear.

Yeah exactly. Excuse to be violent because people like it. Football hooliganism for example had very little of anything to do with football.

Income inequality hasn’t but wealth has. However, that’s mainly down to rising property prices isn’t it? So a generation of people particularly round London sit on a huge pile of housing wealth is the big driver - unearned as they’ve simply got old and seen their house value skyrocket.

Except it isn’t in any other similar economy where the very thing you describe has been tried. It hasn’t raised meaningful revenue.

How much will it cost to nationalise all services and then run them at a subsidised loss sufficient to lower bills? And how will that number be paid for and what will the cost of any additional borrowing be?

Thing is the only hope is someone who is actually good at governing and leading in very difficult circumstances. I’m not sure I have enough evidence for who that might be. I’m not sure it’s consistent either with who might win. Which is worryingly similar to the Tories predicament post Johnson.

The problem is that there is no real clear right horse as nobody has broken ranks, there are no obvious heavyweights and it’s very hard to predict how well or not any might do to when making contact with reality. It’s hit and hope imo. I don’t dislike Keir I think he’s just not got key skills needed

Post 87 Blair studied individual policy polling and realised it was useless. For the reason you state but also because it doesn’t represent the views on contact in the wild. People think things are a great idea until suddenly they don’t.

Grey is on the rise again. No doubt because some of the ‘flat greys’ make the most striking but also easy to care for options.

It’s online. Thus meaning someone is obliged by the online laws to take the most extreme position possible on any given issue. Otherwise they would be a fascist or a commie - depending upon which online space you are in!

Depends if you use the metropolitan borough of Wigan definition….

Not that another example of his poor political judgement is needed but…iirc Nandy was also Cummings ‘it’s so obvious’ pick to be Labour leader to defeat the Tories.

Which raises more or less nothing so doesn’t help the conundrum of how to plug our fiscal hole and fix our public services. For that the median worker needs to pay more tax. Or accept cuts. As Dan says.

God I feel a bad parent now because my main mission is picking something that can ‘do’ for as many occasions as humanly possible.

The whole narrative of ‘it raises questions over the chancellors capability’ line being pursued by some now is bonkers. There is plenty that does raise questions. But her husband failing to remember chase up a license he assumed had been sorted is absolutely not one of them!

Ouch. And yes.

She won’t care.

What a shock!