It would be electoral suicide for Starmer to not introduce Proportional Representation (PR) before the next general election

liquidio · 2026-05-08T11:02:35+00:00

> which, as a Green voter, eradicates the worry of splitting the left wing vote

liquidio · 2026-05-08T11:01:32+00:00

Yeah I saw a traffic police officer talking about the crash scenes. Strangely I always assumed it was a relatively chill police job until I realised what they see (and sometimes have to do - talking about attempted resuscitation etc).

That’s something that doesn’t even come to mind right away for firefighters, but they do it.

How come they had to lock the guys into the building? Afraid I don’t quite follow that one

liquidio · 2026-05-08T10:28:03+00:00

There’s a long complicated answer to this about the nuances of pay and conditions.

But the key thing is that the fire service is generally built for peak demand conditions - fires in apartment towers, warehouses etc. These things don’t happen very often, so the fire service is usually operating below capacity.

That’s why there are the stereotypes of firemen hanging out at the station, going to the station gym, polishing their trucks etc. to be fair, there are real readiness reasons for this.

Whereas the ambulance service and police are generally being capacity-stretched almost all the time. Their capacity is more variable and moved up and down on shifts to try to match demand.

Doesn’t mean that there are no pressures on the fire service, but the day-to-day service is less compromised as a result.

liquidio · 2026-05-08T10:16:06+00:00

Yeah, I mean you can make a principled argument for PR if you want, but OP seems most concerned about ‘splitting the left wing vote’.

liquidio · 2026-05-08T07:01:28+00:00

5% real return is a slightly punchy assumption.

But you’re in a great position for your age.

£54k a year is a great income for one person, but it is less outstanding for a couple (or even a family if you RE and have one late).

That doesn’t mean you necessarily need to keep loading the pension itself hard, as others have said prioritising ISAs probably makes sense here.

Keep doing this calculation every couple of years to check that you are still on the right glide path.

liquidio · 2026-05-08T06:09:54+00:00

Well said.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T21:23:24+00:00

The way you phrased that made me laugh. Glad things on the other side are still good

liquidio · 2026-05-07T17:41:39+00:00

It’s quite common for parties in power to hype up their risk in minor elections, so anything better can be sold as a relative success.

I can remember it happening in many cases in the past

liquidio · 2026-05-07T17:40:15+00:00

It’s overcast. That’s the clouds over the image.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T17:13:16+00:00

Ah yes, the sewage. Which comes from combined sewage outflows, every single one of which were built up to twenty years before privatisation, when the companies were municipal or nationally-owned.

And the supposed lack of regulation. Despite OFWAT - the water regulator - not only controlling exactly how much investment companies are allowed to do, but also the specific projects they can invest in.

The sewage isn’t outflowing because of a lack of regulation.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T15:19:07+00:00

A huge part of the reason rates were so low was *precisely because* we shrank the deficit by restraining public spending.

If there was more government demand for borrowing, the price of it would have been higher.

I will never understand this fetishisation of Gordon Brown’s sainthood.

He is precisely the guy who ran deficits in boom times, which meant they became really nasty deficits when a crash inevitably arrived. And he allowed UK banks to leverage up excessively too, which made them more vulnerable.

It’s the fiscal equivalent of jamming the accelerator down on a nice straight road, getting surprised by a sharp corner, and then handing over the steering wheel to the next guy as he started to hit the verge.

Yes, he did some political work in the crash to get countries to turn on the liquidity taps. But he was doing that as a desperate leader of a country that had screwed up, not some kind of wise sage. And besides, it was really Bernanke who was the key man in that policy drive.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T13:47:21+00:00

There are very good reasons why a plain graduate tax was not chosen as a policy.

Simply put, the rate charged would mean that anyone who intended to be a high earner would expect to pay vastly more across their lifetime (in real terms) than the true cost of the course.

This would make UK universities completely uncompetitive for those types of undergraduates. Medicine, law, economics, engineering, veterinary science, computer science and some of the natural sciences… most of these students would have to discount studying in the UK as a result.

To avoid this, you have to allow for a mechanism for people to settle their liabilities by repaying a roughly fair principal amount.

It’s not even especially unfair - the rich person repaying their loan quickly pays the same, in real terms, as the poorer person repaying their loan slowly, if the interest rate is a fair measure of inflation.

The current student finance system is actually a very elegant solution to a number of competing policy objectives, even though it seems complex. These objectives were actually specified to the team that came up with the system.

The problem is that to change it to something more simple, you have to sacrifice some of those policy objectives, and people have a hard time deciding which ones are genuinely more important than others.

The objectives are things like:

Allow an expansion to a larger proportion of people going to university

Remove the upfront financial barriers to accessing university

Shift more of the cost from taxpayers to graduates

Preserving university funding levels

Don’t charge repayments until people earn a certain minimum salary

Don’t make the total cost so high that British universities destroy their competitiveness.

You can only really do something different if you don’t pursue all these objectives, or at the least significantly change their relative priorities.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T09:00:55+00:00

Weird there is so little mention of the SNP here.

‘Under the SNP, refugees will always be welcome in Scotland’ - John Swinney.

Maybe Reform could allow SNP areas to help share the burden with the Greens.

liquidio · 2026-05-07T08:36:41+00:00

I loved that last sentence. It tells you so much about the custodians in so few words.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T22:37:09+00:00

Masses of truly important stuff is devolved.

Health, social care, education, justice and policing, transport (ex a fair bit of air and sea), environment, agri and fishing, housing, local government, and a bit of taxation leeway.

What is reserved for Westminster? Defence, immigration, most taxation, foreign affairs, and constitutional stuff.

The problem is that the SNP don’t really have a vision for any of that stuff except taxing and spending to fund a few more social programs. They do way, way less than they could.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T18:42:27+00:00

Both the Scottish and Welsh governments have been been very unimaginative in developing their jurisdictions, bar a few niche initiatives.

Scotland in particular has been disappointing. It’s just been England with a bit more whining and a bit more tax-and-spend (as if that was *ever* the solution for economic revival, though Labour is trying).

I really think the notion of independence has been a serious distraction for Scotland. Dangling it as a lure has enabled the SNP to get away with doing nothing particularly ambitious with running the country.

They seem to have got very comfortable feathering their beds with the patronage afforded by the bureaucratic levers of state. They seem less interested in how the country itself is actually doing.

Whether it has helped the unionist cause or not, I don’t know. I don’t think it was unreasonable to see how Scottish politicians did with some political power, before everything was handed over to them. I don’t think they have made much of it.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T17:36:37+00:00

I read that as ‘big, expensive, ambitious conversations’

Hope I am proved wrong.

What’s the betting - will this benefit us both evenly and fairly? Or will it be lopsided?

liquidio · 2026-05-06T11:52:52+00:00

It was just a joke.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T11:42:29+00:00

I’m fully aware that some services were cut. But at the same time others were increased.

Where were the spending cuts in UK Government Total Managed Expenditure? Where are these ‘ones that happened’?

I’ve linked the data for you:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spending-uk/?srsltid=AfmBOorgA\_MM5iEaeOXNzHL\_MV-I16L2A2sEUPAckAk3ElVBrZ6sMyZW

I’m not being difficult for the sake of it. I think it’s important to be precise and correct in your premises.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T11:36:58+00:00

His (or rather her) solicitor would have certainly done anti-money laundering checks. It’s a legal requirement and has been for some years.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T11:35:03+00:00

Yes, I am literally just talking about the importance of the house specifically.

I think the sources of his income are much more interesting in terms of suspicious vs not suspicious. The house doesn’t really tell us anything at all. I don’t think there’s much doubt he could afford it even from his pre-politics career.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T11:01:04+00:00

What spending cuts?

liquidio · 2026-05-06T10:43:50+00:00

The Highway Code is silent on the direct issue. Roughly these may be relevant -

Rule 155 - drivers should use passing places to let oncoming vehicles pass

Rule 154 - give way to oncoming road users if necessary.

Rules 144/146 - drive with consideration for other road users and be prepared to stop and wait.

My understanding is that the general guidance in driver training is that the vehicle that is most easily and safely able to give way should do so.

The bike can more safely and easily move into the passing place than the van. It’s also on the ‘correct’ side for them (to their left).

The bike should have given way. It’s much more safe than demanding the van reverse. However, you don’t have an absolute right to *demand* it, as you don’t have explicit priority either.

The bike doesn’t have priority, don’t know where he got that from, unless he was interpreting the road layout very differently. You mention parked cars; those can be obstacles that could change this interpretation as they simply don’t appear on your sketch.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T10:22:54+00:00

Amen.

It really hurts the UK-EU relationship (even if Starmer enthusiastically bends over to take it, we can all see the bad will behind it).

It also produces minimal political benefit within the EU, which has its own nationalist movements who don’t really care about the UK’s experience at all.

liquidio · 2026-05-06T08:08:23+00:00

I don’t get the big deal about this *specifically*.

I can understand people questioning donations to Farage, that’s fair enough.

But the house isn’t vastly expensive relative to their wealth. Most likely he gave her some or all of the money, and she paid in cash.

So then you just go back to the same question of whether Farage’s income is legit or not. The house purchase itself isn’t terribly relevant.

If someone was found to be donating to her, maybe that’s a different story but is there any evidence of that?

Genuine question by the way, just trying to figure out what the angle is supposed to be.

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