UK Politics - Weeny, Weedy, Weaky

[Arakhor]

How do you think the furlough welfare scheme will be paid for?

I have no idea, but I doubt that the Foreign Office will be paying for it, either way. Johnson made a great stink about foreign aid should be redirected to our diplomatic efforts, such as in Ukraine, so I don't see how that follows that welfare will get a cash injection because of that.

 

[Zardnaar]

£1 billion to effectively buy votes in a critical election is a lot worse than spending it on literally anything else. It is also, notably, spending money - money the same government claimed they did not have.

The issue is less with the amount of money (though I still consider it significant), and more about the ongoing hypocrisy from any Conservative government r.e. public spending and what money they have available to them.

My theory is they don't mind deficit spending to cock block the left doing it when they eventually lose an election.

The left puts up taxes, pays deficit down and gets painted as tax and spend.

I assume the 1 billion was for the DUP to spend in policies?

Minor parties here sell there votes for chicken feed. Can't have tail wag the dog but if you get 5% if the vote (eg the Greens) seems fair to ask for 5% of the budget.

That's something like 6 billion here.

Hence why a billion pounds is nothing when you're talking about nation state levels of spending at least for UK.

I think minor parties don't really understand large numbers, finance ministers do. Covid just cost our government 50 billion if which 20 billion is for discretionary spend. That's something like 29/11 billion pounds.

It's more than pocket change maybe a 10 or 20 quid (the 1 billion).

 

[Gorbles]

Oh yeah, undoubtably. But there are things that would cost less than that to address, that it has been claimed cannot be afforded. The Conservatives repeatedly are able to pull money out of a hat (whatever consequence that has in the future) when it suits them, but insist they cannot for <insert random example related to council budgets or public safety here>. I don't mind criticising them on priorities, it's natural for a Conservative government to have policies from a government I'd prefer in power. It's just the obviously false claim of "there's no money" vs. "oh woops we found some".

 

[Zardnaar]

Oh yeah, undoubtably. But there are things that would cost less than that to address, that it has been claimed cannot be afforded. The Conservatives repeatedly are able to pull money out of a hat (whatever consequence that has in the future) when it suits them, but insist they cannot for <insert random example related to council budgets or public safety here>. I don't mind criticising them on priorities, it's natural for a Conservative government to have policies from a government I'd prefer in power. It's just the obviously false claim of "there's no money" vs. "oh woops we found some".

Just to be clear they're full of crap lol.

My opposition to increased spending is only on some if the crazy wish lists. Green new deal or UBI alone is almost all government spending. And yet some think you can have green new deal plus Ubi plus universal healthcare plus free tertiary and MMT will magically pay for it ( it won't IMHO).

I'm more into doing a lot with what you have. A billion won't do squat pumped into the NHS or spent on welfare.

It would do a lot with foodbanks or school lunches things like that. Basically put up tax and spend it as efficiently as you can.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I assume the 1 billion was for the DUP to spend in policies?

It was for Northern Ireland and not for the DUP itself.
And the devolved government set up there wouldn't
give the DUP a free hand to do what they like with it.

 

[Zardnaar]

It was for Northern Ireland and not for the DUP itself.
And the devolved government set up there wouldn't
give the DUP a free hand to do what they like with it.

Yeah but the money still got spent on country related stuff not a literal bribe for the DUP.

Basically a billion dollars looks like a lot of money to the DUP but the hundreds of billion the Conservatives get to play with is the real prize right?

As I said it's chicken feed. "Here take this ten quid, I'll spend the 20k".

I'm guessing the got a fairly minor ministry of two?

 

[Arakhor]

At the time, there was no devolved government, because Stormont wasn't sitting over the whole cash for energy scandal.

 

[Takhisis]

I assume the 1 billion was for the DUP to spend in policies?

FTFY. As Arakhor says, there was no devolved government at the moment. A colony on the UK's back-porch doorstep.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Since about 1931 the UK gold reserves has not really been related to the amount of pounds that are in existence, and there has been no "certain amount of money" that the government could pay people, or use to buy products from companies, or use to buy back bonds.

The Conservatives did choose to cut spending, actually to reduce the size of the deficit rather than pay it back, but this was totally their choice. They could have keep spend the same, the could have increased it, but they choose to reduce it at just the time when that reduction would do the most damage.

There was that note that Labour left behind after losing the election, "The country has no money. Good luck."

To the first bolded line, this is untrue. Roughly half of our gold reserves (at the time) were sold. For money. If we simplify economics for the country down to a "certain amount of money" (which I don't think is right anyway, but I'm not great with economics), this is not money lost. The conjecture of money lost is based on the rise and fall of gold values since, for which Brown and Labour received a lot of flak. I can't comment on how much of that was deserved or undeserved, but it's weird how you don't, in fairness, raise the argument for selling the gold which is that due to the volality in gold prices, it was better to transform it (the monetary worth) into a different format.

They did mention the change in the value of gold. They said that when Labour decided to sell the gold, it was when gold was at its lowest value, showing that Labour had no idea how to properly get the money back that they wasted.

 

[Samson]

There was that note that Labour left behind after losing the election, "The country has no money. Good luck."

He did. It was never literally true, and he really regrets it.

in my final hours of office, I was writing thank-you notes to my incredible team of civil servants. And then I thought I’d write one letter more to my successor. Into my head came the phrase I’d used to negotiate all those massive savings with my colleagues: “I’m afraid there is no money.” I knew my successor’s job was tough. I guess I wanted to offer them a friendly word on their first day in one of government’s hardest jobs by honouring an old tradition that stretched back to Churchill in the 1930s and the Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling, who bounced down the steps of the Treasury in 1964 to tell Jim Callaghan: “Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock.”
Yet “the note” was not just stupid. It was offensive. That’s why it has made so many people so angry. And that why it was so wrong to write.

 

[Lexicus]

My opposition to increased spending is only on some if the crazy wish lists. Green new deal or UBI alone is almost all government spending. And yet some think you can have green new deal plus Ubi plus universal healthcare plus free tertiary and MMT will magically pay for it ( it won't IMHO).

What if I told you that, as I sit here and type this, the government of the UK maintains a fleet of four underwater boats full of nuclear missiles ready to launch at a moment's notice, and that the UK government pays for this fleet by creating pounds out of nowhere?

There was that note that Labour left behind after losing the election, "The country has no money. Good luck."

This is what happens when you put economically illiterate Blairites in charge of a political party.

 

[Zardnaar]

What if I told you that, as I sit here and type this, the government of the UK maintains a fleet of four underwater boats full of nuclear missiles ready to launch at a moment's notice, and that the UK government pays for this fleet by creating pounds out of nowhere?



This is what happens when you put economically illiterate Blairites in charge of a political party.

A few nuclear submarines are cheap.

You can create money out of nothing but there's a limit. Create to much and people stop believing it's worth anything.

 

[Gorbles]

They did mention the change in the value of gold. They said that when Labour decided to sell the gold, it was when gold was at its lowest value, showing that Labour had no idea how to properly get the money back that they wasted.

Gold prices didn't pick up much for the next couple of years, but sure. I recommend you consume news that isn't just repeated verbatim from whatever your friends tell you. Not that "dunking on 00s Labour" is particularly hard, but when you come out with absurd claims like "they sold off all our gold" (they did not) it kinda makes it hard to discuss anything with reasonable accuracy.

 

[really]

A few nuclear submarines are cheap.

A common argument around reunification of Ireland is how much it would cost given that Northern Ireland is so heavily subsidised.

The first and easiest bits to argue over is British military spending allocated to NI.
Maintaining/renewing nuclear submarines, nuclear missiles, aircraft carriers and fighter jets isn't cheap.

Renewing the nuclear weapons will cost the UK £205 billion according to the campaign for nuclear disarmament.
https://cnduk.org/resources/205-billion-cost-trident/
UK national debt was about £2,000 billion before covid for reference.

 

[Hrothbern]

A common argument around reunification of Ireland is how much it would cost given that Northern Ireland is so heavily subsidised.

The first and easiest bits to argue over is British military spending allocated to NI.
Maintaining/renewing nuclear submarines, nuclear missiles, aircraft carriers and fighter jets isn't cheap.

Renewing the nuclear weapons will cost the UK £205 billion according to the campaign for nuclear disarmament.
https://cnduk.org/resources/205-billion-cost-trident/
UK national debt was about £2,000 billion before covid for reference.

Overhead cost of the UK-4 will have to be carried by the UK-3.
Reducing the salary cost of Parliament by reducing the amount of MPs will be the most simple one.

Getting an agreement for the historical build up of the national debt split between the UK-3 and NI will be a complicated mess.
Could take decades to finalise.

EDIT
The nuke argument back from Ireland could be the same nuke as the leading economist of India Ursa Patnaik uses to calculate the compensation the UK has to pay India for the time India was an UK colony: USD 232 Trillion.

Here the UK chapter of a bigger article on what it would cost former empires to pay for the extracted money diring the colomisation period.

Genuine British apologies would cost 232 Trillion USD
If the sorry movement continues, it is likely that no country will be as severely affected as England. Logical: no country had such a large empire recently. One of the illustrations of the possible consequences of this fact can be found in an essay published last December in a liber amicorum by leading Indian economist Ursa Patnaik. That seemingly insignificant publication spot is at odds with its explosive message: that the English stole as much as 45 trillion (twelve zeros) from India between 1765 and 1938, and that if India had been left untouched, the country's gross national product would increase by $ 232 Trillion in 2003. Has been. By 1700, India accounted for 24 percent of the global economy - a figure that not only gives Patnaik, it is widely recognized. But shortly after the British left, India's share of the global economy was barely more than four percent. That was not all. According to Patnaik, the colonization had also meant an enormous loss of people for India: as many as 1.8 billion (nine zeros) Indians had been killed by the English action.

The publication of such figures naturally leads to debate. Not only because those numbers are speculative to a great extent and yet have some truth in them, but mainly because they serve a purpose. In that regard, another prominent Indian-born scientist and politician, Shashi Taroor, had already thrown the bat into the henhouse a few years ago. During a debate on reparations organized by the Oxford Union, he claimed on the basis of comparable figures that England had no choice but to pull the wallet. Although he added that the damage caused could never be compensated and that therefore every payment is symbolic, payment had to be made. Without payment, reconciliation was impossible. The YouTube video with Taroor's story was viewed millions of times in India.

What about the other former English colonies? If historians and economists start calculating there in the same way, and if that calculation then entails consequences, it is better to drop land in the North Sea right now, which is already not flourishing. That will be one of the explanations for the fact that English specialists generally tend to refer the calculations to the realm of fables. Some even go so far as to claim the opposite: that the colonies cost the motherland more than they delivered.

The complexity of the theme also explains that both supporters and opponents of excuses and compensation prefer to focus on smaller, clearer and preferably concrete subjects. For obvious reasons, critics of the English empire have a preference for recent events - witnesses of this are still more evident than descendants in eventual damages. An example is the events of the Mau Mau uprising, on the eve of Kenya's independence. Six years ago, Secretary of State William Hague apologized for this and offered 5,200 Kenyans compensation of £ 2,600 per person, a total of nearly twenty million. Hague made two comments on this. First, that the matter was settled with this, a "full and final settlement". Second, this did not mean that the British government also recognized other responsibilities within the colonial system.

That's exactly the opposite of what one of the instigators of the Mau Mau rebellion claimed in The Guardian a few weeks later. According to Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), English colonial violence at the time was just as systematic as the current attempts to disguise it. So, if there is such a thing as justice, the English have no choice but to recognize both one and the other. Or, as the newspaper wrote in the introduction to Elkins' article, "If there is any justice, the Mau Mau's stunning legal victory should be the first of many."

Many? The number is probably not even countable. Take the Amritsar massacre (Punjab, India, April 13, 1919) - it was recently commemorated again. According to one estimate, four hundred defenseless civilians were murdered, according to the other eighteen hundred. The English have regularly expressed their grief at this through their Queen and Prime Minister. But apologies, not that. And this even while Churchill already acknowledged that injustice had been committed here. That is why the subject was discussed again in the House of Commons this spring. Some members argued for excuses, others thought this was going too far. And then Secretary of State Mark Field suggested that the government may have done well to find out the financial consequences of any excuses. Theresa May made short work of this suggestion, repeating what had been said so many times: "We deeply regret what happened and the suffering caused." The statement was furiously received in India.

https://www.groene.nl/artikel/het-rommelt-aan-het-sorryfront

 

[EnglishEdward]

It wil be interesting to see which way the large share of the three million Hong Kong refugees, that are put there, vote.

 

[really]

The precedent is that we told them to get lost, it led to a trade war that Ireland lost and Britain probably didn't even notice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_trade_war
WW2 focused minds and resolved it.

The biggest argument would probably be over pension liabilities.
Sinn Féin view for the craic:
https://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/54573

 

[Hrothbern]

It wil be interesting to see which way the large share of the three million Hong Kong refugees, that are put there, vote.

On Singapore-on-Thames ?

 

[EnglishEdward]

On many things: including Irish reunification.

If we put most of them there, they might vote
to rename Northern Ireland. New Hong Kong.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Our police always get their man (even when he hasn't done anything).

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/ukne...about-police-racism/ar-BB16kDiJ?ocid=msedgdhp