British Politics

Write off all of some of the massive debt that the government owes to itself and use some of the freed up borrowing headroom to build houses and repair the crumbling infrastructure (roads, schools), while employing more nursing staff, all of which would give a boost to the flatlining economy.

Some people like to make out that this is all hard because most political problems are difficult to solve (which they are); others like to pretend it's hard because they're financed by large corporations and billionaires; but this one is surprisingly straightforward.

If you want a solution to a huge mess caused by privately educated people who went to Oxford university, let's not ask people who went to Oxford.

IF with "debt owened to itself" you mean the portion that was bought by the BoE with QE, you can't write it off with 0 effects.

That debt has a mirror image in bank reserves which are remunerated by the BoE, which is part of government. The interest government is nominally paying there goes to the banks, it's not "free debt" once interests are above 0.

Not sure that part was clear , i admit it's quite complicated.

Agree completely. Build houses, improve infrastructure, train those short-in-supply industries with grants not loans, make public transport actually viable and a good alternative to cars for any distance over a few miles. Austerity don't work, we all know that, and them saying it's not austerity they're imposing is clearly bullshit to even the dummies in the room.

They're so afraid of giving the ridiculously weakened Tory party ammo, right out the gate. They need some guts and actually try and improve life for most people, not act like timid mice.

They have no guts and no ideas and are on a huge ego trip. Reeves is a tribute act to the macho posturing of Thatcher and May and will probably be leader when Starmer is pensioned off to the donkey sanctuary in the not too distant future. All they care about is being the opposite of Corbyn while collecting as many freebies as they can while they can.

They are all appalling and deserve a good ****ing kicking.

The depressing as opposed to angry part is that it is all so predictable:

There's a reason governments don't write off their debts. Don't even think Corbyn was suggesting anything like this.

The reality is any solutions to our structural problems as a country, following decades of neglect, will require government and private investment.

No, the reason governments don’t write off their debts is that their money printing is handled by the ECB and not by their own central bank, and that QE hadn’t been put into practice before.

QE is a central bank effectively printing money for itself by buying its own assets much as you could if you were able to write yourself a cheque for your own car while keeping your car.

This is why the argument about economies being like a fixed sized cake with not enough to go round are just daft and made for a particular political point.

QE isn't exactly free stuff, it's a *swap* of short term liabilities for longer term liabilities, you still pay the short term interest

Although private education and OXford have produced a series of lemons for politicians I'm not convinced we should be trusting people who leave school without any O levels and wreck the country by talking garbage about Brexit either, but it's a nice earner once you're into Westminster no matter how mediocre your intellect:

I guess like the Labour MPs who took Taylor Swift tickets "for the kids" they have families who need trust funds or holiday homes.

I suspect the 'free clothes, glasses, concert tickets and football boxes' thing, so nicely synchronised with the withdrawal of pensioners' winter fuel allowance, is going to cause our new high-living overlords more trouble than they think it is, and for longer, because it's so clearly hypocritical and so easily remembered and joke-worthy. It doesn't even matter if the overlords switch to other and less checkable back-channel methods to subsidise their lifestyles, because everyone will assume that's what they're doing anyway.

You might think that no one under sixty would know what 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss' means, but apparently younger people have very catholic across-the-decades musical tastes and they probably do know.

And in theory they should be hurt by this moer than if the same happened to tories, because of how labor chooses to position itself with the electorate

I see Starmer promising 'national renewal' with no details about what that is, other than basically cracking down on benefit fraud and saying he wont add tax to working people == taxing non-working people? Or hidden taxes? Or called something other than taxes, such as a 'levy'? Pension raiding, given the fuel allowance cut will probably kill em off before the next election? Who knows? But no actual details at all about this 'national renewal' - so depressing.

So basically promising a better future, just like every other prime minister I can remember. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer.

Liars all.

Socialism sucks. And having a country where the majority of people are a giant drag on the tiny minority of productive wage earners, while you are constantly importing more welfare recipients to compound the problem, makes it suck even more.

the only solution is evidently to tax the people who still manage to live a good life more and give more free stuff to the people who don't produce enough to live comfortably

Except too many of the productive people are fleeing to UAE, Singapore, Australia, NZ, US, etc. So the "solution" is actually accelerating the problem.

That's the solution, the sooner they realize it doesn't work the better. And they only realize it by going allin. Until they can, there will be the jalfrezi claiming you can write off debt and tax the rich a lot more to pay for whatever they want.

Plenty of countries can benefit from productive people currently in the UK, let them flee to our shores.

Absolutely this. The total triumph of thatcherism although ironically thatcher still did a fair bit of planning because they hadn't yet realised they could simply not bother.

We need planning and the public sector cos no-one else is going to do it.

I’m not sure that back then they could afford to simply not bother to do some element of planning because it was much more common for politicians to be held to account than now, the era of client journalism.

Thatchers government was the first to launch serious attacks on the impartiality of the BBC remember, and most of us could see how this would end up.

Most of the ills of the current age can be traced back to her, but no, we really mustn’t have bin bags in the streets in mid winter.

If you're talking about the winter of discontent, I used to walk past a mountain of bin bags left rotting in a park on the way to school, swarming with rats.

So no, we mustn't.

Plus there was a tiny bit more to it than bin bags in the streets.

Of course there was a lot more to it but that’s the image that provided the tipping point for our descent into Monetarist madness, “there is no such thing as society, only the individual”, and rubbishing anything that didn’t warrant an entry in the profit column of the book.

I too walked past piles of bin bags that towered over me on the way to school, but as it was a long, cold winter we didn’t get any rats and it didn’t even smell.

It was the beginning of the long con. “George Davis Is Innocent” shouted graffiti from most London bridges and many walls and a Test match was abandoned when the wicket was dug up by his campaigners. George was duly released only to be found some time later at the wheel of a getaway van surrounded by guns.

The Sun turned "I don't think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos” into the infamous “Crisis? What crisis?” headline that accompanied pictures of bin bags and became an album title by chez favourites Supertramp.

The tabloids had discovered how easy it was to convince people of anything.

Media has got worse as well but I simply dont think it had occured to government not to do substantial things like build power stations because it would be decades beofre it really mattered. They did start but it took blair to really embrace the philosophy of all spin no substance.

Thatherism is to blame because it's triumph has resulted in privatisation eating away at everything. It's still taken 50 years for its final feasts to be prepared.

I do think crime of the century was a very good album (could be the soundtrack for 'starmer the musical'). Overall they're too tuneful and pleasant to count as a favourite.

I just played Bloody Well Right and Sheep back to back and really....one is pedestrian pop rock with a catchy hook and the other a bleak and affecting masterpiece foretelling the current era.

Sadly the sheep don't look interested in usurping the pigs.

Bloody well right is awful

What next? In the city was a rubbish album. i just listened to batman

I also wouldn't compare supertramp to anyhting involving a genius like roger waters.