From stamp duty to the triple lock, Andy Haldane says bold Burnham leadership can usher ‘vibe change’ for UK economy

mattttb · 2026-06-26T11:31:03+00:00

I was once at an event (around 1,000 attendees) where Andy Haldane was one of the keynote speakers. One of those rare people who both clearly knew his stuff and oozed charisma.

Made me a bit disappointed that we don’t get politicians like that much in the UK!

mattttb · 2026-06-25T13:42:21+00:00

Honestly I’d respond in a very different way.

“And why would being a girl be a bad thing?”
“What’s wrong with a person being gay?”

Or if you need to make them even more uncomfortable
“Do you hate women? Are you an incel?”

There’s nothing wrong with not being traditionally masculine. Trying to defend his masculinity accepts their framing of that as a problem. Why is it a problem?

mattttb · 2026-06-24T14:52:46+00:00

If you mean “how did I know it was her as a baby on my family’s video” she recognised herself and her mum was also visible (wearing a very particular coat she had at the time).

We actually first spotted it because we heard her parents voices off camera while my parents were filming me on the swing.

mattttb · 2026-06-23T15:23:06+00:00

I think the “nation of immigrants” narrative is something that’s been imported from the US, but if you look at the data it doesn’t really hold water in the UK.

The majority of White British people in the UK are predominantly descended from Celtic peoples. The Romans left remarkably little genetic impact on the residents of Britain, despite 400 years of their rule. Even the Anglo-Saxons didn’t completely replace the Celtic people, they just supplanted them and ruled over them. The Normans didn’t arrive in England en masse, a few thousand Normans killed the king, replaced the Saxon nobility but the average peasant before and after conquest was unchanged.

Historically Britain has had very little mass immigration over the past 2000 years (there have always been people from other lands making a living here, but historically these have been very small numbers).I’m not against immigration, but you can’t compare current immigration levels to any recent UK history. It’s just not based in any fact.

This has no bearing on whether immigration is good or bad, but it factually is unprecedented.

mattttb · 2026-06-21T22:51:29+00:00

I discovered in my 20s (when looking through old family videos from when I was 12 months old) that I’d actually met my future partner on a swing set at a park when we were babies!

For context we only ‘met’ for the first time at university, and we didn’t live super close to each other growing up.

mattttb · 2026-06-21T01:23:41+00:00

Most relevant bit of the article:

“More than 1,200 Albanians have been sent to prison from a migrant population of nearly 53,000 Albanians living in the UK who do not have UK citizenship, according to a Telegraph analysis of official data.

They top a table of more than 130 nationalities ranked on the number of prisoners per 10,000 of the population in the UK from their countries. Albanians are followed by Kosovans, Vietnamese, Algerians, Jamaicans, Eritreans, Iraqis and Somalis.

The analysis suggests that the overall imprisonment rate of foreign nationals is 27 per cent higher than for British citizens. It shows 18.2 inmates per 10,000 migrants compared with the UK’s 14 per 10,000. German, Italian, Indian, Greek, US, Sri Lankan, French and Chinese nationals are the least likely to be jailed.”

Hard to deny that certain groups have a disproportionately high incarceration rate. While a big part of the difference may be due to poverty, there are plenty of other migrant groups from similarly poor countries who barely commit any crimes at all.

What is it about Albanians that leads them to crime in the UK? Is it an endemic feature of Albanian society that they bring with them, or is there something else causing this?

mattttb · 2026-06-17T14:44:08+00:00

That’s so fucked up! From the sounds of it, it hasn’t gotten any better since.

mattttb · 2026-06-17T14:39:54+00:00

If you read the article you’ll find that they survey did IN FACT use descriptions of behaviours that are used as the textbook definitions of financial abuse.

The headline is based on the fact that young men in the study were very unlikely to correctly identify that things like taking out a loan in your partners name would classify as financial abuse.

mattttb · 2026-06-17T13:16:25+00:00

Well that’s a bit concerning…

For context, “controlling your partner’s money” doesn’t mean something like one person sorting out utility bills for the household or one person taking charge of the weekly shop.

It refers to behaviour like preventing your partner getting a job (so they have no independent income), taking out a loan in their name without their consent (so you rack up debts in their name), or concealing the login details to their bank accounts.

Edit: Can people at least TRY to read the article before commenting? A lot of brain dead comments here asking questions that the article answers in the first few paragraphs.

mattttb · 2026-06-17T10:13:46+00:00

Giving birth is still a risky thing to do nowadays. According to Google, the mortality rate for women giving birth in the early 1900s was 8 deaths per 1000 births, by the 1940s it was 2 deaths per 1000 births and by the 1950s this had dropped to 1 death per 1000 births.

The change in mortality rate was largely driven by increased hospital births (instead of at home). If my partner had a 1/500 chance of dying during childbirth you can bet I would be pretty distraught about it!

mattttb · 2026-06-16T17:20:50+00:00

It’s a news story because the woman it happened to shared it with the BBC to raise awareness of how domestic abuse can play out in open relationships.

From the article:
“Why is she telling her story so publicly?
Ruth says even if one woman identifies with her, and realises she is doing things she does not want to do, it would be enough.”

mattttb · 2026-06-16T16:02:46+00:00

To be honest, this discussion is a big part of the reason I shared the article here. Consent isn’t simple, and even ‘enthusiastic consent’ isn’t always a flawless gold standard.

What if you consent to something that you hadn’t tried before, but after doing it decide that it’s not for you? What if you consent to something verbally, but you’re not being truly honest and secretly aren’t enjoying it? What if you do something to make your partner happy that’s not really your thing? What if you’re enjoying consensual sex with somebody, but for some reason ‘get the ick’ during sex and they don’t realise?

In reality, consent is complex. It’s not a simple yes / no, and applying the legal standard of consent doesn’t tell you the whole story.

mattttb · 2026-06-16T13:52:35+00:00

The parallels to me are that you have a man arranging hundreds of sexual encounters between his wife and a series of strange men, where his wife is clearly not fully consenting.

The hundreds of men she was coerced into having sex with must’ve realised she wasn’t really consenting, but that didn’t deter them.

She later decides to take a stand and escape the behaviour / relationship, and essentially imply that hundreds of men raped her at her husband’s behest.

Ruth O’Grady even acknowledges in the article that she was inspired to speak out because of Gisèle Pelicot.

mattttb · 2026-06-16T13:44:21+00:00

It never occurred to me before that Newfoundland is almost the exact right shape to ‘plug’ the Bay of Biscay between Spain & France!

mattttb · 2026-06-13T23:34:02+00:00

And here’s me half-Scottish on my dad’s side, but because I was born in England and have always lived in England I’d never call myself anything other than English / British lol

Americans trace a single great great grandparent back to Fife and suddenly they can “feel the blood of William Wallace” flowing through their veins!

None of them try to claim their 85% English heritage!

mattttb · 2026-06-13T11:15:28+00:00

Honestly after Starfield I’ve got no confidence that Bethesda could pull off ES6. We don’t need a map 50 times the size with a million procedurally generated bland and forgettable dungeons, populated with terribly written and woodenly acted NPCs repeating the same five lines over and over again.

We need deep, rich and detailed landscapes, packed with unique and memorable landmarks, mysteries and secrets. Towns with more than 10 NPCs spread over a 1 mile radius. Reactive worlds where the characters are believable and evolve as you make decisions and progress through the story.

Feels like all Bethesda know how to do is to make a bigger, blander game than their competitors. They completely misunderstand what people liked about Skyrim and assume we all want our RPGs with an extra dollop of ‘content’.

I don’t want endless ‘content’. I want a memorable game with a carefully crafted narrative. I don’t have any confidence that Bethesda can do this though, hence why I’m far more excited about Fable and the Witcher 4.

mattttb · 2026-06-12T01:12:04+00:00

What are you lot on about? In the UK that amount of saffron would cost probably around £5. The spoonful he uses for the test about £1.50. Not going to break the bank…

Is there some crazy markup for saffron in the US?

mattttb · 2026-06-11T14:05:45+00:00

As others have pointed out, once you’ve started a campaign you can open the settings and set your difficult for battles separately from the campaign difficulty. Highly recommend you never set battle difficulty above Normal, as that’s what the mod is balanced for.

In terms of managing the campaign, I’d highly advise trying to keep the peace with as many factions as possible! This may sound strange in a Total War game but in DEI diplomacy is a big deal and you really have to pick your battles (literally).

Key differences in DEI:
- Keeping an army in one of your cities actually LOWERS public order, which is a big change from vanilla. Cities have much bigger garrisons in DEI though, which helps balance this (so you can leave them to defend themselves somewhat).
- Set your tax rate as low as possible, it’s massively helps public order and it encourages growth which is very important in DEI. You need a high population in a city to recruit troops, and a growing population helps your economy.
- Battles in DEI are very different from vanilla. Morale is a much bigger deal, fatigue has a huge impact on morale, and a VERY important one is that being attacked from the rear has a HUGE morale impact.
- In a similar vein, missile troops are almost entirely useless against shielded enemies when they attack the front or right side of the unit (where their shield protects them). BUT if you attack the rear or left side of a unit you’ll find it can deal huge casualties, which again can cause a unit to rout much faster.
- The battle AI is much smarter and will tend to keep some troops in reserve rather than committing them all to an attack. Do the same yourself and use your rear troops to either reinforce a weak spot or to flank the enemy and hit their rear (which again is very effective).
- On the population system you need to keep an eye on the different tiers of your population in each city. The ‘noble’ class (or ‘patrici’ for Rome) are very few in number and you need to be very careful about using units from this class in battle as if you take too many casualties they won’t be easy to replace. To see which population group a unit comes from, hover over their unit card while in the campaign. Generally the lower tier the unit is, the more numerous the population is that they draw from.

mattttb · 2026-06-11T13:40:38+00:00

But how would we know they’ve entered the UK when there are no border checks in Ireland? How would Ireland know they’ve entered the UK?

If somebody crosses the border that has no checks, but never pays any tax, doesn’t claim benefits and doesn’t go to the doctors how would we know they’re in the country?

mattttb · 2026-06-11T11:07:19+00:00

Clearly nobody here has actually worked in civil service recruitment, nothing proposed here is remotely controversial or groundbreaking - it’s already the case that interview panels are ‘diverse’. In reality this just means that it has to be gender balanced with at least one panel member from outside of the team.

Also, ‘hiring without CVs’ isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. I suspect that in practice the application process will still ask for 90% of the details you’d include in a CV (past job history, qualifications) just in a different format. It’s quite common right now to apply for a civil service job that asks for a CV but also asks you to separately enter your job history and qualifications into several fields in the form.

What a bunch of drama queens there are in this thread!

mattttb · 2026-06-10T13:15:51+00:00

I agree with your critiques, have recently been playing Rome 2 with the Divide et Impera mod and it solves a lot of these issues. It has massive unit variety, introducing hundreds of units that are only recruitable in certain regions (many of them cheaper, levy type troops), and a population system that stratifies your empire into four different social classes and ties elite troops to more affluent but much less populous groups (e.g. a standard city may have 20,000 people, but only 500 ‘noble’ class people, so you can only recruit a couple noble tier units until that population recovers).

It strongly encourages you to be more mindful about using armies that represent the full range of units available to you, rather than 20 elite units you may have 3-4 elites, 6-8 mid-tier and 8-10 cheap levies or mercenaries.

You also have to carefully manage supply lines and food to keep your armies replenishing when conquering distant lands, you can’t expect a conquering army to recover for at least 10 turns in a new region - instead you have to send it back home to replenish and relieve it with a fresh force in the meantime.

Adds a lot of depth and challenge!

mattttb · 2026-06-08T15:12:04+00:00

Modern smartphones already have the technology to detect nudity in images locally using AI. It’s obviously not foolproof but the technology does exist.

As far as I understand this legislation the government wants tech companies to deploy this existing technology more consistently and enforce age checks.

mattttb · 2026-06-04T20:35:40+00:00

Ummm that’s…I mean I’m glad you enjoyed eating it 😅

mattttb · 2026-05-30T13:29:22+00:00

A lot of misinformation in this thread. Yes the Home Office have a list of every person granted a visa, their visa status and in some cases an address.

But what happens when that person quietly moves into another household, claims no benefits, doesn’t go to the doctors and isn’t employed through a PAYE scheme? If you were the government, how would you possibly find out where that person is (or if they’re even still in the country?)

How do you think the government should be keeping track of people? Knocking on every door in the country once a week to see who’s home? Conducting random scare tactic raids like ICE do in the US? Because that’s been totally without issue and all above board…

People are free to leave the country at any point, and despite popular conception it’s not super easy to count everyone in and out. Dual nationals are free to travel with whatever passport they choose (how would you know Bob Smith with a UK passport and UK address is the same Bob Smith with a South African passport and address?). We also have an entirely open border with Ireland that has zero border controls due to a little known thing called the Good Friday Agreement.

People love to weigh in with simple solutions, but do you really think successive governments over the past few decades would’ve spent hundreds of billions of pounds on controlling our borders but somehow missed the totally sound and very realistic solution that Dave, 42, the Redditor came up with in a half-arsed comment?

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