Government hand break turn

I hate the concept of U turns in government being bad things.

I can't stand this lot, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. But smashing people over the head if they make a mistake and making out like politicians can't change their mind is a recipe for disaster.

The entire system is f.cked. A new PM, a new Chancellor, a country in crisis. In any organisation there'd be f.ck ups left right & centre but we make out that won't happen in govt. It's mind bending.

 

Wife said on Sunday morning that she'd watched Truss being interviwed and she looked shocking, a broken woman, i would'nt have a clue if she's right or wrong, i dont generally watch debates unless that lass's on from Labour, Angela Raynor,

 

Tory cnuts
"We've listened to folks concerns over not reducing the top rate of tax"
NO YOU FECKING HAVEN'T. YOUVE SEEN THE OPINION POLLS.
My hatred of these b4stards is possibly higher than it's ever been.
Vent over.
Sorry for my use of language Tina .

 

The concept of U turns?

All government ’plans’ should be costed and debated, they should be made clinically on the best evidence available.

The only way a U turn would be necessary in those circumstances is if the evidence changed dramatically, this is exceedingly rare.

Since 2019; our ‘populist’ government have adopted the approach of leaking ‘plans’ and then either dropping them or amending them depending on the public reaction. This is v dangerous; the public don’t understand how to run a country.

This latest clusterfück isn’t even that. The chancellor took the advice of an already discredited economist, and ran with it. Sacking the actual expert, ignoring the input of the independent body, and just listening to the one person we all know is clueless.

That cost the economy billions, and he doubled down. Then it cost potential votes, and he didn’t care. He has U turned because it turns out his fellow MPs have told him they refuse to vote for it.

It’s not a U turn, it’s an admission of defeat.

Whether he ever believed this was the right thing to do is irrelevant at this point. It’s a failure.

 

@Scoff answered your point re 2020.
However if you believe that there was a principle that public spending should match taxation prior to March 2020 you’ve been reading the wrong papers.

I do understand that some people have a problem with the neoliberal reliance on growth, however there’s a pragmatic view of the world where we have to accept that the population is growing therefore a stagnant economy is in fact a shrinking economy. Economies by nature need an amount of constant growth.

And I’ve no idea what kind of companies you’ve worked for, but it’s a fact that you can’t have growth without investment, some of which inevitably is funded from ‘future growth’. Whether that’s a carpenter buying a new van, a manufacturer building a new plant, or a country investing in a nuclear power station.

The notion that a country’s books should be balanced like those of a household is a Tory myth to cut spending on the vulnerable.

And it never works, for a million different reasons, sometimes the obvious solution to a problem that has a clear price attached is a better solution than withdrawing that funding and watching costs spiral elsewhere.

 

His hedge fund mates made all their money when the pound crashed, that bit is done.

 

Thank you for the lecture in macroeconomic theory, but none of it explains the public and press obsession with this particular £2bn.

 

According to 30p Lee, who is a two hat, this was not a u-turn, but a change of direction! WTAF, do these people think we are stupid

 

Weirdly I’m not seeing either the public or press being obsessed with this £2bn*.

And it was you who brought up the point about matching tax with spending. If you don’t want a discussion opening up, maybe don’t keep trying to dump your hobbyhorse into every discussion and it might not happen

* the views I’m seeing are more about:
Unfunded tax cuts - ie borrowing money we’ll be expected to pay back, in order to fund tax cuts for people who have enough money
And the fact that due to the recklessness of that decision, the markets went into free fall.

It’s not about £2bn in tax cuts. They’re not even going to happen, but they’ve already cost the country well in excess of £50bn.

 

Great, now we're getting somewhere. You're against saddling future generations with massive, needless debt. We agree. That's literally the "hobbyhorse" I've been on for two and a half years.

 

Well that all depends upon ‘needless’, which is your opinion, and not universal

 

I just think that £2bn spent on the - albeit discredited principle of - trickle down economics is less wasteful and worthy of scorn than £370bn to obviously fail at the impossible task of stopping folk getting ill and take educational and living standards back 10-50 years. I know you disagree.

 

Well it’s much more complex than your characterisation.
Firstly I do agree there was an enormous amount of wasted money and mismanagement around the governments covid response, we might disagree about the detail and what was necessary v what was waste.
And secondly; the £2bn isn’t going to happen, but it’s already cost us more than 25x that to fund an amateurish U turn.

I’m not gonna sit and do the sums, but I reckon I could probably easily find over £100bn in covid ‘waste’ over 2 years, which looks fairly trivial compared to £50bn overnight from letting a moron do a mini-budget.

Edit: latest estimate of the 2bn is that it’s cost us £65bn. going well innit

 

Russ in Cheshire does an epic job of summarising the complete and total shambles the govt gives us each week, but my God if there's a smugger looking bellwhiff I'll eat my hat.