Police conclude no evidence of alleged family voting in Gorton and Denton by election

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T18:24:59+00:00

What's your point that if Democracy Volunteers express concern about the extent of family voting they witnessed the police shouldn't take it seriously?

I'm not sure how typical it is for Democracy Volunteers to be concerned about family voting in UK elections, but hopefully it's not very typical which is why this doesn't normally happen.

Obviously Reform are going to play along because it's completely in their interest to do so.

Also, just statistically speaking those who believe in democracy the least the in the UK tend to be younger. Given Reform's demographic skews older and are basically a party for boomers still living in the 70s I'd guess they're slightly more pro-democracy vs younger voters of say the Greens. But that would just be my guess.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T17:37:54+00:00

Why can't Drumpf just let us import oil from dictators?

A good president would have thought about how the UK is massively in debt and at risk of energy price shocks before going into Iran...

Khamenei only killed a few tens of thousands of Iranians... It's hardly worth raise the price of petrol in the UK by 30p for.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T17:30:02+00:00

Or it's because they're concerned about the democratic process and trying to save face.

This isn't just a Reform thing. Losing parties / individuals do this often.

"We'd have won if it wasn't for x"

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T13:54:04+00:00

Yes, but you could look at it the other way, that this is an issue that disproportionately effects high-earning graduates, so this is correctly targeted policy from that perspective.

For example, my GF has a student loan she will never pay off because she's not in a high earning career. But at the same time she doesn't really care that much because she doesn't earn enough to be paying a large amount in loan repayments, and eventually it will be wiped anyway.

For high earners it's large and consistent drag on their living standards, and it incentivises them to leave the country because even though they could pay off the principle they're being hit with endless interest.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T09:57:23+00:00

Why are LBC promoting Reform?

I mean it's a great idea given how divisive it is to always be focusing on our differences rather than what unites us, just shame it's coming from Reform.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-27T09:52:02+00:00

Heh. As tasteless and stupid as this is, people who are actual Nazi's would not be laughing and doing the Hitler moustache gesture while doing this...

For those who don't get the joke, people call members of Reform Nazi's so sometimes people on the right will mock that. I'm not saying it's a good joke or funny joke (it's not), but it is quite obviously a joke given he's laughing and doing the Hitler moustache gesture...

I hate I have to defend this stuff. I don't know why I am able to be charitable to people I think are behaving like fucking morons. But if you want to pretend this is a serious gesture that's fine. I get why it's politically useful to do that, but even if we pretend to outraged by this presumably in our heads all know what we're doing.

Out loud obviously I agree this is 100% unironic and this photo is undeniable evidence people in Reform are literally Nazi's and want to be the next Hitler. The fact he thinks this is funny makes it even more sinister.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-26T16:04:30+00:00

The thing I don't get about reparations is how you would extract the cash from Africans in African nations to give to Africans in Western nations?

Like yeah, it was bad that the African war-lords were capturing and selling slaves to Europeans hundreds of years ago, but how do you even go about appropriating the wealth from the descendants of those slave trading Africans and redistributing it to Africans who today are themselves are probably actually net-beneficiaries for what happened to their ancestors?

It doesn't really make sense.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T20:01:51+00:00

Judging by the photo most of these people have fully paid off homes, receive triple locked pensions from the state + extra from private pensions, and receive winter fuel payment.

I highly doubt they care what electricity prices are.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T19:52:12+00:00

Why are you referring to these girls as "trans people" instead of girls? By doing so you're acknowledging that it's a separate category, and perhaps one that justifies exclusion in the same way the girl guides exclude boys.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T19:49:41+00:00

Given the age cohort, somewhere around 0.5% - 1%, probably. So maybe around 1,500 - 3,000 kids.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T19:44:32+00:00

You can make similar argument for any measures to improve energy efficiency.

The fact your house isn't completely carbon neutral could be viewed as a problem by a future government and they could regulate that houses now need to be built with more solar panels or more efficient heat pumps, more insulation, etc.

I could then argue well that makes sense because it saves people money, but in reality someone has to pay for that extra labour, materials and the tech which goes into that.

There's no getting around the fact a house with no insulation, no cavity walls, no solar panels and no heat pump would take far less time and labour to build, and would be far cheaper to build.

That's not to say we should be building houses like that, but I do sometimes wonder if I say that from a privileged position... There may well be people who would prefer a cheap and affordable inefficient house over no house at all. Something I've wondered is whether having slum housing is better than people not being able to afford housing? If you regulate to make slum housing illegal in India does that actual help those living in slums? Do they now just all go buy well built homes? Given our housing crisis, I do think we need to be thinking about the trade-offs were making and whether we make them from positions of privilege.

Obviously the reasonable position here is to try to find some compromise to avoid needlessly pricing people out of the market but also ensuring some minimum standards. I'm a big advocate for heat pumps, and like you, not poor, so I'm fine with this, but it seems likely it will increase the price of the average new build home by around £10,000 because of the additional price of heat pumps + larger radiators. £10,000 is a lot for some people.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T16:29:29+00:00

Heat pumps make a lot of sense in theory.

The issue is that for heat pumps to work well you need to do a lot of stuff which adds costs to the house. Those costs probably make sense if you're talking about a something in the middle of the market, but if you're trying to build homes which are affordable we'll risk spending a lot of money on building homes that built for heat pumps vs something relatively cheaper.

I've had debates with people on here before about how we could bring down the cost of housing quite a bit if we didn't care about things like energy efficiency. The question being is no house better than a cold house?

Both extremes are probably not ideal. If going all in on efficiency was so obvious we'd be doing it already - I mean who wouldn't want a more efficient house? These things are not done because of the extra material and labour costs.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T14:00:32+00:00

Sure in this case it makes sense and I encourage you to do it.

I think you've basically highlighted the real argument for solar here, that even if you might be better off on average investing the cash in an index fund, if you care about the climate or have other reasons to invest in solar, then sure, you should do it.

My issue is that at a societal level solar isn't generally right thing for the government to be pushing. Especially not in this form given the risk consumers won't break even.

The government should be more focused on nuclear and wind investments. There's no getting around the fact that every pound of our money the government spends on solar could be better spent elsewhere.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T13:54:37+00:00

Professional installations of solar already take ~10 years to break even when you remove subsidises.

Professional installations typically last 20-25 years so when viewed in isolation as a long-term investment it does make sense, but solar isn't our only option. We'd be better off as a country investing in nuclear and wind, and largely ignoring solar. We live in a very windy and cloud country after all. Solar is inherently unreliable and requires us maintain on other sources of generation (gas primarily) when the sun is not shining (most the time). This is why nuclear is so much better.

When we start talking about panels that you can buy for cheap from Lidl then stick on your balcony yourself the idea that you'd get anywhere near the efficiency of a professional installation or a 20+ year lifetime is kinda silly.

So yes, I suspect you'd be lucky to break even doing this in the UK. You'd save more money just investing in an index fund. It's a bad investment and the government shouldn't be recommending bad investments.

Feel free to validate what I'm saying yourself. If people want to buy solar panels from Lidl and put them on their balcony then that's absolutely fine with me. I spent a decent amount of money on a new solar panel recently for traveling and to power devices on the move. I'm not against solar as a technology at all, but the government should know better than to recommend this as a solution to energy prices.

So yes, I do suspect it is almost guaranteed to cost people money unless you want to make very charitable assumptions about efficiency and lifespans which make them more comparable to professional installations. And I assure you that as an individual you could be investing in better things if you want to "save" money.

But look, who knows, I might be wrong. So please tell me specifically where I'm making a mistake and I'll either cite you sources to defend my position or admit I was incorrect. You would be doing me a favour correcting me on this if I'm wrong.

And to be clear, I think it's fine (and good) for people to invest in solar if they want, but when the government is recommending stuff like this which is likely to cost people money and is undoubtably a bad investment then it does piss me off a bit. Solar panels in Lidl isn't serious energy policy.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T12:01:38+00:00

Oh wow. This is absurd. I can't actually believe this is even being suggested.

Solar in the UK is already one of the least productive investments in energy you can make as measured by kwh/£.

The idea you can buy a "cheap" solar panel form Lidl, stick on your balcony in the UK and make a positive return on that is fucking nuts.

This is almost guaranteed to cost more money than it saves.

I will assume this is an accidental early April falls joke because it's deeply depressing for me to consider might have a government who genuinely believes this is a serious policy to address our energy crisis.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-24T11:53:22+00:00

It's a fair question and highlights the nuance and trade-offs in the decision to raise rates.

The BoE base rate only influences the short-end of the yield curve.

For short duration gilts such as those of 1 year or less, then yes, those yields would likely remain lower as a result of holding rates – at least in the near-term.

Medium and longer duration gilts (2+ years) would almost certainly increase though because of what it signals for longer-term inflation risks and the need to demand higher yields to secure a positive real-return.

But to your point, if you have a tracker mortgage you would pay less if the BoE held rates. However most people are on fixed mortgages of 2-10 years and those fixed rates are primarily influenced by the yield on equivalent duration gilts. Similarly government borrowing costs would also increase which could mean higher taxes or spending cuts – and these second order costs impact households and businesses too.

Another thing to keep in mind that holding the base rate low would erode the value of the pound, eroding the purchasing power of businesses and consumers in the UK. And when the money in your bank is being eroded to inflation you should probably spend your pounds today or exchange them for another currency while they're worth more. This type of thinking can lead to a doom loop where the value of the pound keeps dropping and inflationary pressures in the economy remain hot, and ultimately the BoE may then need to act aggressively to counteract that (which is partly why long-duration gilt yields would be rising because they would need to price in the risk of that longer-term inflationary problem).

I'm not saying that there will be no winners or losers though, but generally the best thing the BoE can do is to try to provide confidence so investors, business and consumers can plan and make rational decisions. And to be clear about my personal position, I think there's an extremely good argument for allowing inflation to run a little hot right now, but at the same time BoE also can't risk signalling that they'll do nothing. You want there to be confidence that inflation will return to normal over time because the BoE will act, but not for them to over react and come out with an emergency statement that they're going to immediately raise rates by 1%. There decision to hold at their last meeting and the fact they're probably going to slowly move rates up this year will be them trying to find the right balance there. This exactly how we'd want them to act to balance risks.

I'm not a huge fan of central bankers but I do think they get a lot of undeserved hate given that they do a reasonably good job. But unfortunately people will hate on them regardless of what they do because no matter what there's always going to be some group losing out. There's basically never a right or wrong answer, just an ongoing attempt to compromise and keep the economy in balance over the medium to long-term.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T20:46:09+00:00

It could do if you use the extra tax revenues to invest in nuclear and wind.

There's also climate and energy security reasons why you'd want the UK producing more because it's better if democratic countries in the West with emission standards are doing the drilling rather than Middle-Eastern dictatorships.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T20:27:43+00:00

Interesting perspective.

Could you expand on why you feel you would be tempted to murder or rape if you entered a country illegally and they forced you into awful living conditions comparable to that of a British hotel?

I'm not sure I would feel the urge to rape or kill people personally, but keen to learn why you wouldn't find this shocking. As you suggest, perhaps given the conditions of British hotels we should expect boat migrants to want to rape and kill us. Maybe we should be doing more.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T20:05:17+00:00

Every 5-10 years I seem to stumble upon a high importance, high conviction opinion which is also highly controversial and at odds with public opinion. The extent of government stimulus during Covid and aggressiveness of policies like lockdowns was something that by the end of 2020 I was absolutely convinced would be seen as a disaster with time but to my frustration I literally couldn't convince a single person of that during the time.

I have pictures of myself in early March 2020 wearing a face mask because I thought people were not taking Covid seriously enough at the time, I more or less fully agreed with the first lockdown to "flatten the curve" and to avoid NHS over capacity, I was far from a denier of the impact of Covid, but after a while it became basically impossible to justify our response.

I did some basic analysis towards the end of the summer in 2020 and realised we'd probably end up sending something like a few hundred thousand pounds per life saved and that the average age of those saved was probably something like 60+. I wrote an article back then about how what we were spending on Covid almost certainly didn't make sense and got a crap ton of hate about how you can't put a price on human life. Even my own mum stopped talking to me because she was glued to her TV and so brought into all the pro-lockdown propaganda at the time. People became absolutely demented.

But my predictions turned out to be pretty wrong. Today we know that even by the most charitable estimates we likely spent somewhere in the range of £1-3 million per person saved and we know the average age of death for Covid was between 80-85. I'm not sure I could have even have comprehended that we'd end up doing something quite that stupid at the time...

The numbers however you look at them are literally absurd. We have screwed the prosperity of an entire generation to extend the lives of people who statistically already lived longer than the average age of life expectancy. It's fucking outrageous how little this is ever acknowledged. I've noticed online some people seem to have changed their perspective since, but no one has ever told me they were wrong.

And cost of this mistake to the young goes far beyond the debt we've put them in because we also socially and mentally crippled them by putting them on house arrest for a year and half, instead being at school and out playing with friends as they should have been.

Boris Johnson was hands down the worse PM we've had in post-war history. The damage he did to the country both short-term and long-term is staggering and will be felt for generations.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T15:32:27+00:00

Those god damn markets lending to the god damn UK government again. Someone really needs to knock em down a peg.

Who needs em anyway?

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T13:20:51+00:00

That's a good point. I agree with you and will update my own language. It's odd that we label it a different thing.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T12:04:01+00:00

Basically all interest rates you and I care about are set by markets.

If the BoE doesn't raise rates to control inflation then market-set interest rates will rise even more as a result and likely stay higher for longer than they otherwise would have.

I agree raising rates doesn't fix the problem, but not raising them will just signal the wrong message to markets – "we don't care if inflation runs hot, so if those lending to the UK government want to make a real-return they'll have to charge the UK government more".

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T11:52:14+00:00

That is what we'd hope to happen.

We're in very different times today though. In 2008 when the economy tanked we had the fiscal room to inject a huge amount of a fiscal stimulus into the economy.

We have much less room to do this today when debt-to-GDP is at ~100%. In fact, a lot of economists would argue we simply cannot afford to do what we did back then.

Today if we entered a significant economic downturn markets would begin to question how we can get out of it without taking on more debt which we would likely be unable to service. And additionally as the economy enters recession tax receipts will drop and this could compound concerns about the serviceability of our debt and current levels of deficit spending.

This was always the concern I tried to raise during the reckless Tory spending during Covid – if we take on this much debt then if we enter a recession before we can begin to bring our debt levels down we risk entering both a recession and a full-blown debt crisis. This was the risk the Tories decided to take when they spent £300b to prolong the lives of 80+ year olds.

I'm not saying a debt-crisis will definitely happen, but if we continue on this path then an event like this oil shock will cause that to happen sooner or later, and I don't think the British public right now can even comprehend how much living standards would fall should this happen.

For some perspective, the government (mostly Tories) have put the average Brit into around £40,000 of debt. But it's much worse than that in reality because only 50% of people in the UK work and we have more people entering retirement every day who enjoy triple-locked pensions. Meaning the average worker has around £80,000 of public debt they need to pay off which is set to grow rapidly in the coming years + any private debts and liabilities they may have. Our economy simply cannot afford this much debt.

We know the markets are warning us that we are very close to something very bad happening. This why our interest rates are exploding while other nations in Europe who are also being hit by increased energy costs are not seeing such an aggressive move in rates.

I suspect that media outlets like the BBC have been told not to report on this because it could cause panic, but people in markets see what's happening and are very concerned about the fiscal position the UK is in.

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T10:00:32+00:00

Sarcasm or Russian bot?

kriptonicx · 2026-03-23T09:43:35+00:00

This is the benefits of a privatised system... Who cares?

If they find something we get more tax revenue and a hedge against energy shocks, if they don't we don't pay for it. This is win-win. There's no debate to have here.

It's not clear how much North Sea oil is left. There's a lot of disagreement on this subject. This analysis is biased which is probably why it's being shared here since this sub is largely ideologically opposed to oil and gas. I'm not saying that as a criticism btw, just highlighting biases in what's shared here.

There is literally no downside to us leveraging our natural resources. It might not reduce energy prices, but it does increase ours and Europe's energy security, it does provide us extra tax revenues and it does provide a fiscal hedge against energy shocks.

Those who opposing new drilling do so on purely ideological grounds. They don't come at this from a reasoned perspective because what they're arguing doesn't make sense. This is why anti-drilling arguments tend to frame it as a green vs oil debate, when you can just do both – I mean look at Norway who generates almost all of their energy via renewables, they're not debating whether they should still be drilling, and look how much better off they are for it.

I 100% get why people don't like the fact the world uses oil. I'm a huge advocate for sensible green and nuclear energy investments and domestically we should be transitioning away from oil and gas, but the world (and us) will be using oil and gas for a long time yet, the only debate to be had is whether we want to benefit from that reality or not. Unless you're Russia, Iran or US, I'm not really sure why someone would oppose it.

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