The Labour Government

You have to wonder about the sincerity of it being a personal problem - that is not to say it wasn't. If it was you would be entitled to look at Starmer and his leadership capabilities.

There are provisions for Starmer to engage with Badenoch and let her know if Reeves has personal issues and request that she does not "make hay" over it, it happens quite frequently apparently, but alas not on this occasion. As leader you would expect him to be across this if it was personal and, whatever the issue he could have told Reeves to stay away and engage with Badenoch - again it never happened. TBH it does not bother me (unless it's a political issue) what upset Reeves yesterday. All I do think, is that it was yet another clusterfuck by Starmer, and still today he hasn't got his story straight.

Things don't look too good for Keir and his gang right now because despite winning the vote I think the general consensus is he lost on account of the fact the Bill will not be delivering anything remotely like it was intended to do and his authority has been severely challenged, whether you like it or not.

Angela will be rising from the ashes pretty soon - gawd help us.
 
You have to wonder about the sincerity of it being a personal problem - that is not to say it wasn't. If it was you would be entitled to look at Starmer and his leadership capabilities.

There are provisions for Starmer to engage with Badenoch and let her know if Reeves has personal issues and request that she does not "make hay" over it, it happens quite frequently apparently, but alas not on this occasion. As leader you would expect him to be across this if it was personal and, whatever the issue he could have told Reeves to stay away and engage with Badenoch - again it never happened. TBH it does not bother me (unless it's a political issue) what upset Reeves yesterday. All I do think, is that it was yet another clusterfuck by Starmer, and still today he hasn't got his story straight.

Things don't look too good for Keir and his gang right now because despite winning the vote I think the general consensus is he lost on account of the fact the Bill will not be delivering anything remotely like it was intended to do and his authority has been severely challenged, whether you like it or not.

Angela will be rising from the ashes pretty soon - gawd help us.
But they have been directly responsible for your energy bills falling 7%. lol

Oh, and my Welsh father-in-law's car insurance went up like yours, but here in England, mine went down. It must be Welsh Labour's fault.
 
You have to wonder about the sincerity of it being a personal problem - that is not to say it wasn't. If it was you would be entitled to look at Starmer and his leadership capabilities.

There are provisions for Starmer to engage with Badenoch and let her know if Reeves has personal issues and request that she does not "make hay" over it, it happens quite frequently apparently, but alas not on this occasion. As leader you would expect him to be across this if it was personal and, whatever the issue he could have told Reeves to stay away and engage with Badenoch - again it never happened. TBH it does not bother me (unless it's a political issue) what upset Reeves yesterday. All I do think, is that it was yet another clusterfuck by Starmer, and still today he hasn't got his story straight.

Things don't look too good for Keir and his gang right now because despite winning the vote I think the general consensus is he lost on account of the fact the Bill will not be delivering anything remotely like it was intended to do and his authority has been severely challenged, whether you like it or not.

Angela will be rising from the ashes pretty soon - gawd help us.
Was Starmer was aware beforehand
 
How are the markets doing now? Oh, that's right - they fully recovered in next to no time and are up again so far today. One thing's for sure - the markets aren't anywhere near as spooked by all this than people like you are, and they seem quite happy with Reeves being chancellor.
The market has done exactly as I said it would. The gilt market that is, which is the only one that counts.

Gilt yields rising sharply yesterday when Reeves’ position was questioned and Starmer failed to support her - because of concerns around a change in the fiscal mandate - and then retracing when her position appeared more secure.

I don’t know how I can explain it more simply than I have.
 
The market has done exactly as I said it would. The gilt market that is, which is the only one that counts.

Gilt yields rising sharply yesterday when Reeves’ position was questioned and Starmer failed to support her - because of concerns around a change in the fiscal mandate - and then retracing when her position appeared more secure.

I don’t know how I can explain it more simply than I have.
It was a few hours and that's it. You need to get over yourself mate
 
Honest answer is I don't know and I'm not sure anyone really does. If I had to guess using other data to base my estimate on I'd say anywhere between 5% to 15%. Bear in mind that that number will be much closer to zero for people actually claiming related benefits as even after appeals the success rate is around 60% (approx, don't quote me on that) so the vast majority of spurious claims will be filtered out and in that 40% who are turned down there will be a lot of people who probably need support.

As for what's driving it I think there's loads of studies showing the impact of poverty, housing etc but at lot of these were pre Covid and I think we still have lots of holes in our knowledge. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a material link between social media, mental health illness and being on benefits for an emerging minority.

Personally what I think we're seeing is a kind of 'boiling frog' situation, these issues that have making life more stressful and mentally challenging for people have been bubbling for decades and we've largely ignored them. What's happened now is they've got to the point where they are more obviously breaking people and if you throw in a few additional accelerants you've got a crisis that appears to have come from nowhere but has been growing for a while. I think the reason it's manifesting more in young people is simply that they are somewhat more exposed to more of the drivers like economic and housing insecurity than the rest of the population and the other accelerants are focused on them. But the rest of the population aren't that far behind, the amount of productivity we've lost through stress and mental illness has gone up significantly.

As inequality rises more people lose hope and when you lose hope you give up trying and health issues spiral. The key thing that almost all of our current generation of politicians lack is a vision and plan to restore that hope. The one person who's actually not bad at it is Farage but that also makes him the most despicable because he's pedalling a type of false hope and he knows full well that's what he's doing.

Putting aside the questions of AI and automation for a moment, we're heading to a demographic situation where by the 2040s we could have one working age person for every retiree or something nightmarish like that. So guess what next gen of FOCs (inc me), if you're able to you're going to have to stay economically active longer because otherwise you'll put a crushing unsustainable burden on younger people; we'll try and do better at keeping you well enough to do this. Younger folks, we need you to stay in the game because without you it all goes to ratshit; we'll all try and do better to stop putting barriers in your way. Hey people who are less keen on immigrants, we need you to accept that, counterintuitive though it seems, we can't actually get to a better place without immigration.

In other words we're all going to have to compromise, stop fighting each other and rediscover the meaning of community. If that sounds a bit like being on a wartime footing to be blunt if we want to solve our problems both self inflicted and caused by global events that's where we are I think. We just appear to be lacking the wartime leaders ! That's before you demand they are tech policy savvy enough to wrangle out of control global technology firms!!!

You only asked a single question and got a rant, sorry!
Not at all - I think above is a marvellous post, and thanks for taking the time to post it.

The only thing I might take issue with is the bit about Farage. Despite the overriding cynical attitude on here, I still genuinely believe that most people motivated to go into politics, do so to try to make the country better in some form or other. They may have different approaches and different emphasis regarding which demographic should benefit more or less after any successes, but I think everyone wants to make things better.

If we can get the economy thriving again, then potentially everyone could be better off. Most (all perhaps) would have more money in their back pocket and everyone would benefit from better healthcare, more and better policing, better infrastructure, roads etc etc. All of this can be paid for if we can get growth back to 3 or 4% for a sustained period. Farage believes (as do I) that we achieve this only by the state getting off the backs of working people, allowing businesses to thrive. Lower tax rates, fewer regulations and less state meddling in people's lives.

So I don't think he's being disingenuous. He may be misguided but we'll see.
 
You have to wonder about the sincerity of it being a personal problem - that is not to say it wasn't. If it was you would be entitled to look at Starmer and his leadership capabilities.

There are provisions for Starmer to engage with Badenoch and let her know if Reeves has personal issues and request that she does not "make hay" over it, it happens quite frequently apparently, but alas not on this occasion. As leader you would expect him to be across this if it was personal and, whatever the issue he could have told Reeves to stay away and engage with Badenoch - again it never happened. TBH it does not bother me (unless it's a political issue) what upset Reeves yesterday. All I do think, is that it was yet another clusterfuck by Starmer, and still today he hasn't got his story straight.

Things don't look too good for Keir and his gang right now because despite winning the vote I think the general consensus is he lost on account of the fact the Bill will not be delivering anything remotely like it was intended to do and his authority has been severely challenged, whether you like it or not.

Angela will be rising from the ashes pretty soon - gawd help us.
Perfect summary
 
Poor Lady trying to sort out the massive “black hole the Tory’s hid “ and now she has a black hole to sort out( all the Tory’s fault) Bless her!
 

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