What is the point of labour ?

[Cheese]

 

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Is there anything they haven't u-turned on yet?

[Leith Green]

19 minutes ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

Is there anything they haven't u-turned on yet?

Sending the immigrants home?

[Brother Blades]

On 24/07/2024 at 13:46, Lukovic said:

Judging from your way of thinking, I can imagine some children are accidents.

Very underrated post if it was deliberate! 

[aDONisSheep]

53 minutes ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

Is there anything they haven't u-turned on yet?

Bombing kids in Palestine.  Although, in his defence, he does sometimes put on a 'sad' face.

 

[DeeTillEhDeh]

2 hours ago, Leith Green said:

Sending the immigrants home?

They're sending them home - just not via Rwanda.

Edited July 25 by DeeTillEhDeh

[strichener]

5 hours ago, aDONisSheep said:

Shyt the bed, now we're getting hung up on merits of measurement and whether relative poverty exactly maps onto actual poverty!

No we aren't.  Absolute and relative poverty do not exactly map.

It's also not semantics, there will always be a proportion of people in relative poverty, there is no reason why we should have people in absolute poverty.

[JamieThomas]

On 02/07/2018 at 09:11, JamieThomas said:

Corbyn is a sound enough punter, he'd be a good Prime Minister for England. 

Know a few Labourites from back home though (campaigners, an ex councillor) and it seemed to me that literally all they actually cared about was getting back in power, with zero mention of what they'd actually do with it.

Guess we found out what they'd do with it.

[picklish]

15 hours ago, virginton said:

It is an either/or because the UK (and Scotland too) are not shitting money to deal with the myriad social and economic problems that they face. Pretending that the bottom line either does not matter (see the Truss/Kwarteng budget) or deflecting it away with talk about Trident/defence spending is not serious.

Politics is about making choices about where resources should be allocated and where political capital should be spent too. This also applies to measures to combat poverty that have a direct impact on the bottom line of government finances: the most impactful and fair measures should take priority. Galloping rates of rent/housing costs are a far more signficant driving force of poverty (and high benefit costs too) than lifting the two child cap.

The bottom line/shitting money - you are treating the economy like household finances. The 'bottom line' isn't a real macro economic measure. It's you failing to understand how a national economy works.

Your Truss/Kwarteng point is both neither about 'the bottom line' nor is related to the issue. It's a very clear example of a straw man. You've merely randomly picked an event about economics and made a false comparison. 

But if you believe in 'the bottom line' then it logically follows that you should also believe in 'taking from one expenditure to give to another'. So you talk about resource allocation, but argue against altering defence expenditure. It's incoherent, your point makes no sense. Either it's about balancing the books or it isn't. Which is it?

Finally, you get into whataboutery. Are there other measure to reduce poverty? Yes. Is this one? Also yes. Saying that 'my way of reducing poverty is better than yours' isn't a useful contribution. It's a failure to engage with the proposal. 

Ultimately, your typically issue, evident through most of your contributions, is that you decide an issue in your mind, and then defend it without looking at the bigger picture, or believing that it may be wrong. This is called anchoring bias.

Edited July 25 by picklish

[vikingTON]

7 hours ago, picklish said:

The bottom line/shitting money - you are treating the economy like household finances. The 'bottom line' isn't a real macro economic measure. It's you failing to understand how a national economy works.

Your Truss/Kwarteng point is both neither about 'the bottom line' nor is related to the issue. It's a very clear example of a straw man. You've merely randomly picked an event about economics and made a false comparison. 

But if you believe in 'the bottom line' then it logically follows that you should also believe in 'taking from one expenditure to give to another'. So you talk about resource allocation, but argue against altering defence expenditure. It's incoherent, your point makes no sense. Either it's about balancing the books or it isn't. Which is it?

Identifying overall limitations to a government's budget and competition between departments/policies ≠ 'treating the economy like household finances'.

At no point did I "argue against altering defence expenditure" - either provide direct evidence for that, or retract your straw man claim.
 

Quote

 

Finally, you get into whataboutery. Are there other measure to reduce poverty? Yes. Is this one? Also yes. Saying that 'my way of reducing poverty is better than yours' isn't a useful contribution. It's a failure to engage with the proposal. 

Ultimately, your typically issue, evident through most of your contributions, is that you decide an issue in your mind, and then defend it without looking at the bigger picture, or believing that it may be wrong. This is called anchoring bias.

 

It's only 'whataboutery' if you don't understand politics beyond the stage of student union posturing. We are not discussing some Green New Deal proposal that claims to have a significant multiplier effect: it is quite simply increasing or reducing benefits to certain houesholds, at the taxpayer's exspense. Which leads us to some very straightforward questions for decision-making:

Would lifting a two-child benefit cap reduce overall levels of poverty? Yes.

Is it the most effective/efficient policy - to reduce poverty for the largest number of people in society? Certainly not.

Would the costs of paying additional benefits be better used elsewhere to deal with the myriad other social and economic issues impacting the UK - with the potential for an actual return on that investment (for example, towards sorting the bin fire that is social care, with knock-on consequences for the NHS)? Undoubtedly yes too.

And lastly - here's where the politics really comes in - would lifting the benefit cap for large families be the 'fairest' policy in terms of alleviating poverty in the UK? In my view, no it wouldn't.

That you disagree with some of the above statements do not make them straw men or 'whataboutery' = as opposed to you literally making things up which is.

Edited July 26 by vikingTON

[Fullerene]

23 hours ago, Cheese said:

There's anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million properties sitting empty in the UK at any one time. Including around 250,000 long term empty properties.

So it's less of a supply/demand thing and more of a landlord thing.

There are more empty buildings in London than buildings (full stop) in Liverpool.

[Granny Danger]

Looks like Labour are going to introduce taxes in the autumn that were not in their manifesto.  Good news in more ways than one imo.

 

[doulikefish]

7 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Looks like Labour are going to introduce taxes in the autumn that were not in their manifesto.  Good news in more ways than one imo.

 

Hold on, they were saying just the other day that removing the 2 child cap wasn't in there manifesto so that makes it ok to keep it 

[Granny Danger]

18 minutes ago, doulikefish said:

Hold on, they were saying just the other day that removing the 2 child cap wasn't in there manifesto so that makes it ok to keep it 

Exactly my point.

[doulikefish]

3 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Exactly my point.

I also believe that the 20 billion black hole that wasn't true is now also going to be mentioned 

[MONKMAN]

So the £20B black hole that Labour repeatedly insisted was lies, turns out to be true.  Who'd have thought it.  

[Michael W]

Rachel Reeves has spent months practising her shocked face in order to announce the things she read in the OBR report months ago as new information. 

[Leith Green]

2 hours ago, MONKMAN said:

So the £20B black hole that Labour repeatedly insisted was lies, turns out to be true.  Who'd have thought it.  

Anas "read my lying lips" Sarwar?

[Leith Green]

This is classic Labour. They lied in 2014, lost dozens of seats afterwards for a decade.......and here we are 3 weeks in and they are caught out in yet another lie.

Never mind though, they have a massive majority, nothing to see here.

[Granny Danger]

4 hours ago, MONKMAN said:

So the £20B black hole that Labour repeatedly insisted was lies, turns out to be true.  Who'd have thought it.  

I’d think it.  The Tories have totally fucked up the country* so a financial black hole of that magnitude really shouldn’t come as a shock.  The rotational nature of U.K. politics under FPTP means that it will all be forgotten about by the next time they have a chance of power; 5 years or 10 if Starmer is really ‘lucky’.

* does not excuse Labour’s ignorance or lies.