UK Politics - BoJo and chums

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Samson

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New thread on UK politics, to celebrate BoJos great levelling up efforts such as reducing duty on champagne.



Old thread is here.
 
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For something a bit different:
https://labourlist.org/2021/10/unit...ectoral-reform-in-victory-for-pr-campaigners/
'Unite has passed a motion at its policy conference today that commits the Labour-affiliated trade union to opposing first-past-the-post and instead “supporting moves to explore, select and introduce a new voting system for the UK”.

Campaigners against the current voting system used for UK general elections are celebrating the result – particularly because a Labour conference vote on the subject last month only fell due to a lack of union support.'
I'm all for it. If Labour got over their hangups about it it would probably help their goals in the long run.
It would probably take some of the extremes out of daily British politics with politics turning to a more consensus type, and UKIP etc. Being represented but not necrssarily being in gov.
 
I read the link. I agree with most, but not all of it.

More importantly is what it does not say.

The UK trade unions have whole heartedly supported the Labour party for thirty years.

And got precisely nowhere.

Even when a Labour government was elected in 1997, they retained the anti-union laws
and the gap between the millionaire rentier and the working class widened substantially.

Many trade unionists believe that the link between their union and the labour party is unhelpful.

Some of them want to step aside from party politics and look at supporting candidates on a case by case basis.
It is politically much easier to do, without appearing to betray labour principles, in a ranked preference system.
 
That is a surprisingly good comic strip from Steve Bell.
 
I thought we'd be having tea one strip per year. Much neater.
 
The last one took three years to fill. It's not US politics, after all!
 
Speaking about the last three years:

Shell and BP paid zero tax on North Sea gas and oil for three years
Firms defend paying no corporation tax after government handed out billions to energy giants

Shell and BP, which together produce more than 1.7bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, have not paid any corporation tax on oil and gas production in the North Sea for the last three years, company filings reveal.

Spoiler :
The oil giants, which have an annual global footprint of greenhouse gases more than five times bigger than Britain’s, are benefiting from billions of pounds of tax breaks and reliefs for oil and gas production.

Shell and BP paid no corporation tax or production levies on North Sea oil operations between 2018 and 2020, and claimed tax reliefs of nearly £400m, according to annual “payments to governments” reports analysed by the Observer.

Over the same three-year period, they paid shareholders more than £44bn in dividends.

A petroleum revenue tax of 35% was effectively scrapped by the then chancellor, George Osborne, in 2016 and oil giants can claim billions of pounds in taxpayer handouts for decommissioning rigs.

The North Sea is now one of the most profitable areas in the world for oil and gas production, after tax cuts by the government to encourage production.

Shell and BP have set targets to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 by investing in cleaner energy, but say the UK will continue to need oil and gas from the North Sea, which also supports thousands of jobs.

Climate campaigners are now challenging the UK tax regime in a high court case. They want the payouts to be scrapped and a ban on any new oil and gas projects in the North Sea to help cut carbon emissions.

Philip Evans, oil and gas campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “It’s outrageous that as the UK prepares to host global climate talks in Glasgow, we still have one of the lowest effective tax rates in the world for oil extraction.

We’re giving tax breaks worth billions of pounds to companies that have been fuelling the climate emergency for decades.”

There are about 180 oil rigs in the North Sea and the sector has generated about £360bn in net tax revenues since 1970, which is about £7.2bn a year.

The UK has some of the lowest oil tax rates in the world. An analysis by research company Rystad Energy in January found the UK is now the most profitable country in the world for the development of oil and gas “mega-projects”.

Taxpayers will foot a bill of more than £18bn for the decommissioning of the oil and gas infrastructure in the North Sea up to 2065 – made up of tax repayments and a reduction in offshore corporation tax. Campaigners want the handouts to be scrapped and used for investing in clean energy.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, faces a legal challenge over the tax handout to oil and gas operators by campaigners. Paid to Pollute, a group of environmental organisations, says that the taxpayer handouts to oil and gas companies are unlawful because they conflict with the UK’s legal duty to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. A judicial review is due to be heard before the end of the year.

Gabrielle Jeliazkov, a campaigner at Platform, a UK group that investigates the social and environmental effects of the global oil industry and is supporting the legal case, said: “The government has spent too long backing oil giants through tax breaks and subsidies. It has had devastating consequences for the climate.”

Shell and BP also face strong opposition over new projects in the North Sea. A report published last week by Friends of the Earth and the New Economics Foundation found that the oil and gas industry is preparing to seek approval for 30 offshore projects by 2025.

Shell has defended plans for the Cambo project, a controversial oilfield off Shetland that contains about 800m barrels of oil and is awaiting approval from the Oil and Gas Authority, a government licensing body. Greenpeace lost a legal bid this month for the government to revoke the permit for BP to drill at the Vorlich oilfield in the North Sea, which started production in November last year.

It was reported by Reuters last week that Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning had rejected Shell’s plans to develop the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea after considering its environmental statement.

A Shell spokesperson said: “Our total oil production already peaked in 2019 and we expect it to continue declining, including through divestments. We’re already investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy. The North Sea Transition Deal agreed earlier this year also maps out how the sector will reduce emissions in line with the government’s net zero targets.” The company said it paid no corporation tax on North Sea production last year because of tax losses in previous years.

A BP spokesperson said: “All BP’s North Sea assets are owned by companies that are subject to UK tax in accordance with UK law. Over the years, BP has contributed over £40bn in taxes to the UK government from its North Sea business.

“In recent years, in line with longstanding UK tax regulations, tax relief on the significant investments we have recently made in the North Sea business and the challenging price environment, including the steep oil price falls in 2015 and 2020, have meant we have paid no North Sea corporate taxes.”

A government spokesperson said: “The UK oil and gas industry has paid around £375bn in production taxes to date – with companies in the North Sea subject to headline rates that are more than double those paid by other businesses. Relief for decommissioning costs is a fundamental part of the UK’s tax system.”

Now where does this leave BeauJo's new environmentals credentials?
 
From a New Scientist writeup of a podcast:

Take immigration. Spiegelhalter discovers a stat that says immigration has fallen in the UK by 13,000 people, but when he downloads the relevant table from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), he finds that the margin of error is plus or minus 73,000. “This seems rather large,” he says.

But it gets worse. The way these numbers are generated is even flakier. Ed Humpherson, of numbers watchdog the UK Statistics Authority, says that the immigration estimate primarily comes from an “intention survey”. This is a questionnaire the ONS uses for people entering and leaving the country about the length of their trip, whether they intend to stay long, and so on. No one is obliged to reply.

Millions of people come in and out of the country during the year, but the ONS gets just 5000 responses. Its final estimate is a result of combining this tiny dataset with some other data, such as the number of visas awarded.​
 
Well now, many of us Leavers long since concluded that government figures on immigration were
meaningless, but gave up pointing that out as the government presented them as accurate estimates;
and anyone who questioned them was slandered and vilified as being ignorant, racist or xenophobic etc.

Being told that a million or so more EU citizens had applied for right to remain than expected from
the numbers estimated as being in the UK merely confirmed our view that UK governments were lying.

It would seem from your posting that maintaining a consistent approach across government to maintain
such a charade has finally encountered the emperor's new clothes situation. Some low paid political innocent
or a professional statistician independent of HMG for his bread declines to be pressured to support a false prospectus.

Regarding actually knowing the number inside: car parks, countries, sporting venues with statutorily limited numbers or jails etc.

Sometimes I am ordered by my family to drive them into Norwich.

There is a road sign on the inner ring road which reports on the number of spaces in each of four or five central car parks.

The way this works is very simple. When one pulls out the ticket (or others insert a prepaid periodic subscription card),
at the entrance barrier and the metal arm swings up the count of parked cars there in that car park is incremented by one.

When one puts the now paid for ticket or (subscription card I presume) at the exit barrier the count is decremented by one.

The number of spaces displayed is the car park capacity minus the current count.

If people present passports on entry to and exit from the UK to an electronic terminal, and that transmits the details
to a central store, then hey presto; there is a count of who is in the UK and who is not and who they are.

The requirements for estimation would be: border with the RoI, smuggled in lorries, at US air bases etc.

David Cameron claimed that he was going to get immigration under control in his election campaign in 2010.
Remember the Windrush scandal. Yet how can anything be got under control, if it is not measured?

One also wonders why no such simple system was implemented in the UK in ten years.

One can not help thinking that this is because the UK government (whether Remainer or Brexiter)
prefers to make numbers up to suit the political climate, and that policy would be impossible to
credibly sustain, if there was anything approaching a half way decent accurate system in operation.
 
The Tories pretending to lower immigrations has been a thing for a decade now, yet it apparently still continues to win votes.
 
Well now, many of us Leavers long since concluded that government figures on immigration were meaningless, but gave up pointing that out as the government presented them as accurate estimates; and anyone who questioned them was slandered and vilified as being ignorant, racist or xenophobic etc.
So on the one hand you are admitting that this is about getting/keeping foreigners out but on the other complain about being called xenophobic.
 
So on the one hand you are admitting that this is about getting/keeping foreigners out but on the other complain about being called xenophobic.

No, I am not admitting that.

It is about dishonest UK governments not knowing what is going on and misleading their electorate.
 
I think if you ostentatiously donned a poppy in public on November 2nd here you'd be seen as a massive weirdo.

Even on Nov 11 I think it's really more of a memorial service specific thing, I don't think I've ever noticed people on TV or in politics with them.
 
I think if you ostentatiously donned a poppy in public on November 2nd here you'd be seen as a massive weirdo.
Ostentatiously wearing a poppy but not a mask, despite being surrounded by mask wearing old people (at COP26 yesterday). However there is no doubt he is a massive weirdo.
 
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