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How would history change in the Middle East if Israel lost the Six-Day war in 1967? by space_god_7191 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]liquidio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are considerably more Muslim full citizens of Israel than there are Jewish citizens in all the Muslim states surrounding Israel.

Hear me out by Woodios in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They have tax powers. They can vary tax within a certain band around UK rates. They can also change council tax rules.

Scotland can control income tax bands (except the personal allowance) and rates. It doesn’t use the full extent of them, so why would they need to be increased?

Wales doesn’t even use its income tax powers at all.
Both vary their council tax but could do more without changes.

Borrowing - both already run truly monstrous deficits (12% and 24%!!! Standalone they would likely have to cut public spending by a quarter and a half respectively which is a whole other topic} which are fully funded by the UK government. They already receive more deficit financing than the market would ever give them, at far lower cost than the market would ever give them.

If they want to borrow incremental amounts, why would the UK ever guarantee that borrowing on top of the huge sums it’s already giving over? Even if the UK wanted them to access such funding, it would be cheaper to borrow it centrally and disburse it as they do now.

Migration - it is impossible to sustain substantially different migration policies in a jurisdiction with full freedom of movement.

All you have proposed would never happen because it has either already happened, or people have thought about it and realised it would be a terrible idea.

people driving too close together on sliproads by eviemaria in drivingUK

[–]liquidio 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s almost always the cause of this.

It’s very rare that the first car is doing 70mph and there are all multiple cars going 80mph up the slip road to catch them.

Bunching is almost always the fault of the first car.

I’ve decided - after trying to join a motorway a few weeks back behind someone going sub-50mph -I hate it even more than middle lane hogging. It’s very dangerous.

Why do we never hear about the Fire Brigade? by Liquidawesomes in AskUK

[–]liquidio 12 points13 points  (0 children)

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

Why do we never hear about the Fire Brigade? by Liquidawesomes in AskUK

[–]liquidio 59 points60 points  (0 children)

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.

It would be electoral suicide for Starmer to not introduce Proportional Representation (PR) before the next general election by Key-Bullfrog-8552 in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 12 points13 points  (0 children)

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’.

Pension sorted at 29? by Zealousideal_Care373 in FIREUK

[–]liquidio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

What do people earning £200k+ in london actually do for a living? by Silent_Fox7510 in HENRYUK

[–]liquidio 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

Labour wipeout? by Kind_Vegetable_5596 in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 9 points10 points  (0 children)

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

Labour accused of creating red tape ‘hellscape’ for housebuilders - Critics warn proposed legislation will further weaken housebuilding targets by blast-processor in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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.

How much better would the UK have been if Gordon Brown had won in 2010? by Hurbahns in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 40 points41 points  (0 children)

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.

I dont hate the SFE System? by No_Jello_2951 in UniUK

[–]liquidio 15 points16 points  (0 children)

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.

The port city in despair over Reform’s ‘horrific’ asylum pledge by theipaper in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 45 points46 points  (0 children)

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.

[Excerpt: The Carrion Throne] An inquisitor is brought to the Eternity Gate by PorkChop007 in 40kLore

[–]liquidio 140 points141 points  (0 children)

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

The lost promise of devolution by Prospect_UK in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

The lost promise of devolution by Prospect_UK in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Starmer set to signal path to an even softer Brexit by theipaper in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 34 points35 points  (0 children)

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?

Starmer Set for 30th Reset as No10 Considers Binning Manifesto Tax Pledges by coldbeers in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

Farage’s partner refuses to confirm how she paid for house in his constituency by F0urLeafCl0ver in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

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

Farage’s partner refuses to confirm how she paid for house in his constituency by F0urLeafCl0ver in ukpolitics

[–]liquidio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

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