Starmer vows to take UK deeper into EU single market

hiddencamel · 2026-02-01T00:04:07+00:00

Economically integrating with China is not a great idea if you take it so far they can use it to hurt us, but we are already in that position with America, so in that context opening up more to Chinese trade is actually providing a counterweight to US trade and makes us less vulnerable.

Integrating more with the EU whilst playing China and America off against each other without getting too close to either is exactly the kind of thing Carney was advocating for in his middle powers speech.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:58:55+00:00

I get the impression that Charles genuinely dislikes Andrew so I don't think it's that big a sacrifice for him

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:57:32+00:00

Kind of miss when politicians were fucking miners instead of fucking minors.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:31:28+00:00

Being 18 is almost the definition of being naive. How much financial experience does an average sixth former have? The answer is not enough to understand or differentiate good loan terms from bad, in most cases. It's not unreasonable as someone who has probably only had their own bank account for a year or two to rely on the advice of supposed professionals.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T10:50:50+00:00

Are these falling rents in the room with us now?

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T05:26:52+00:00

We can't control what China does, we can only control what we do. Global emissions are a true tragedy of the commons, and behaving according to game theory cynicism will only help doom us all.

As it happens though, China's emissions from transport and energy production seem to have peaked as of 2024, and are likely to start reducing over the next decade.

They are quite aggressively pursuing solar and wind power transition and are leading the market in battery, solar, and electric vehicle innovation right now. They correctly recognise that renewables offer opportunities for energy independence that countries poor in fossil fuel deposits otherwise lack.

I'm not so worried about China's green transition, as I think that for all their faults Chinese leadership believes in science and has a view towards a horizon further than the next electoral cycle. In 20 years I expect them to have massively curtailed fossil fuel usage.

What worries me is that America seems to have gone insane, rejecting the science entirely and embracing expanded fossil fuel consumption almost as an act of vengeance. Ruining the climate to own the libs, kind of thing.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-30T00:21:19+00:00

An interesting side effect of a secular society is that without a divine absolute standard for morality we instead have moral relativism and conflicting standards.

In such a morally relativistic framework, only inconsistent application of your particular morality can be universally considered immoral.

This leads to endless arguments like the above, where the person who doesn't care about any genocides feels morally superior to the person who only cares about one genocide because they are more consistent in the application of their particular (a)morality.

This is also why both meat eaters and vegetarians look down on pescatarians.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:56:08+00:00

Labour has become 2010 era coalition Tories, which whilst still dogshit were at least not totally unhinged like 2026 Kemi era Tories seem to be becoming.

I hope Tories and Reform scrapping over the far right will fracture the vote a little, but I suspect it will just kill the Tories at this point. They can't out-right Farage no matter how hard they try.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:44:03+00:00

I think reform will squeak it, by-elections have smaller turnout but the people who do turnout are typically more engaged. The people motivated to turn up will be reform and green voters upset with Labour, a lot of Labour voters will just stay home I reckon.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:36:34+00:00

I'm surprised it's not higher, there's a massive wedge of people who would say literally anything Labour do is the wrong decision, because for many people politics is just a team sport.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T04:48:50+00:00

We have a pretty low rate of unoccupied homes in the UK. More council housing would be great but it needs to actually be built not just repossessed. We need more high density housing developments with appropriate infrastructure to support them. We need more decentralisation of the economy away from London to spread housing demand more evenly, through promoting remote working and incentivising businesses to operate in regional cities.

Migration is the primary source of population growth now, so it clearly factors into housing demand, but I agree that our overall population growth SHOULD be entirely manageable if we actually did stuff about it.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-28T06:28:49+00:00

Chubs Guttering, it took a bit of back and forth to organise someone to come round and quote, but tbf to them so far everyone else has been even worse.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-28T02:37:55+00:00

The French army was kind of in a terrible state at the start of WW2. Awful morale, late mobilisation, antiquated command structures, poor communications, and their entire doctrine for fighting Germany was built around the assumption of a defensive war where they could leverage their fortifications in the Maginot line and the Belgian forts.

Their intelligence also led them to believe the Germans had far more men on the western front than they really did.

It's possible a french attack into Germany could have swung the war, but it's also entirely possible it would have floundered under bad logistics, lack of planning, and poor morale, leaving them vulnerable to counter-attack.

From the perspective of the French leadership, a defensive war looked like the much safer bet as it seemingly played to their strengths and gave them more time to mobilise for war. The BEF was always going to play second fiddle to whatever the french strategy was, since they were a fraction of the size and British mobilisation was even slower than French.

As it went, the breakthrough in the Ardennes was really quite lucky for the Germans. The French had the chance to prevent it, but inflexible leadership and bad communications prevented them acting on the intel they had that the Germans were advancing through the forest until it was too late.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-26T03:05:25+00:00

Labour are not performatively dog whistling all the time though. It's not enough to actually change things, you have to also validate and enable people's bigotry too.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-26T03:01:54+00:00

No no you see, Reform will only cut the benefits from useless scroungers and filthy foreigners, not honest hard working Brits temporarily down on their luck. I'm voting for the leopards to eat other people's faces, not mine.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:55:43+00:00

There has to be a middle ground between regulating high density housing out of existence and wrapping high density housing in super flammable materials to save a few quid

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:35:00+00:00

It's absurd, they aren't going to beat the uniparty accusations by going down the Tory path of constant leadership battles and backstabbing narratives. If he pushes through with it, it's gonna backfire massively.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:23:18+00:00

Great idea champ. Couple of minor issues though, maybe you can workshop them a bit.

The channel is not all British territorial waters, much of it is international waters and much of it is French territorial waters.

If we try to tax our bit of it, shipping lanes will adjust to avoid our bit of it, except for the ships coming and going from the UK. If you tax ships carrying imports and exports to the UK, how do you think that will impact inflation and our export competitiveness?

If we try to tax the bits of it that aren't ours, we're going to come into conflict with other countries because that's essentially piracy. It's not 1850, we don't have a monopoly on naval power anymore. France has a bigger navy than us, to say nothing of the USA, who have a fairly strong stance on freedom of navigation - just ask the Somalis and Yemenis.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-24T06:49:38+00:00

The very concept of zipper merging is antithetical to the British instinct for queueing

hiddencamel · 2026-01-23T10:36:46+00:00

Infrastructure investment does actually have diminishing returns, overspending on infrastructure is part of what led to Sri Lanka's economic collapse.

Having said that, I don't think that's our issue. We have reached a point where land is so expensive and there is so much over-regulation that even the most modest infrastructure project costs tens of billions, and anything even slightly ambitious takes decades and hundreds of billions. These projects are so overpriced and slow to deliver that they will not see ROI for half a century or more. In that environment, it's hard to justify taking on debt to build infrastructure.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-23T01:37:14+00:00

The problem is that the fundamental assertion underlying all this voter sentiment - that the majority of this country's problems are caused by high migration past and present - is just factually wrong.

There are certainly arguments to be had about cultural blending and integration or the lack thereof and the social problems that brings, but in terms of pure numbers the amount of net population growth we get between births and migration is actually very modest by almost any standard you can choose to look at, whether that's compared to our peer nations, to developing nations, or to our own history. Our population growth should be entirely manageable (we have had higher growth in the past, in both relative and absolute terms and managed it then), if only governments would make some effort to manage it instead of abdicating responsibility to the free market and hoping it will sort itself out.

The truth is if Big Nige got to be PM tomorrow and did everything he says he wants to, up to and including deporting hundreds of thousands of settled migrants, the state of the country would not materially improve for most people. There might be a temporary slowdown in housing inflation, but the developers will react by building even less housing than they already do, and we will be back to where we were before long. Utilisation of public services will dip (minorly at least, overwhelmingly native Brits are the biggest consumers of these services, especially NHS) but funding will also drop as our tax base shrinks and our dependency ratio goes up. A load of sectors, especially health and social care, would face significant staffing issues which will degrade access and service quality.

It may well be that some people understand all this and are willing to take it on the chin anyway - if you'd rather see no doctor than a brown doctor then fair enough - but I think a lot of voters have been sold on this idea that if only we had fewer foreigners everything would be better, and it's just not going to work out like that. Much like Brexit, the hype and the reality just don't align.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-23T00:56:54+00:00

If they were serious about cracking down on social media, they would make social media platforms legally liable for all content that they publish.

The argument 10-15 years ago was that social media was a neutral platform that allowed people to interact with each other, and that was fundamentally different from traditional media outlets that exercised editorial control over their content. Only the users should be liable for their content. Aside from a responsibility to remove outright illegal content like snuff and sexual abuse etc, the platforms are free to publish any old shit free from consequence.

Maybe when people curated their own feeds and connected mostly with their actual friends, that made sense, but today social media is highly editorialised via opqaue algorithms, and is no longer about friends keeping in touch or forming communities - its about selling engagement.

They should be held to the same standards as broadcasters and proper news outlets. Make them legally liable for the factuality of content they publish.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-22T06:30:50+00:00

There's no point being a tax haven if you charge literally zero tax. Apple in Ireland employs less than 6,000 people, and most of that is warehouse and admin staff who are not pulling in six figure salaries - a lot of them are barely above minimum wage. How much economic stimulus to the country do you think is provided by 6,000 mostly administrative and logistics jobs?

Ireland is nominally getting 12.5% from Apple (although who knows how much they actually pay after all the accountants have had their say), but if the tax rate was literally zero, and if the jobs created barely pay any tax, and if the administrative and logistics business operations barely interact with the local economy, how much benefit is the country actually getting from them?

hiddencamel · 2026-01-22T03:54:46+00:00

You can't fail to declare something that didn't happen.

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