What Do You Think Today?

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peter
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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

UK Budget day, but honestly, I can't find myself interested.

Chancellor Reeves has already let us know what is coming. Big taxes to fill the black hole. Big borrowing to boost our growth. Big changes in the fiscal rules to give herself more flexibility.

Business is less than happy, considering the rise in employers NI contributions plus the rise in the national minimum wage a double whammy. The City is looking very nervously at the gilt markets, as if in anticipation of another 'Truss event'. (Nb. This must be a concern for Reeves, not just in terms of what she is doing, but that such market fallout from a budget can occur at all. Truss's disastrous budget brought down her government within weeks; it must have shaken all potential Chancellor's of the future, to see just how badly things can go wrong if they make a misjudgement.) And basically, we are all going to be poorer. (Tell me something I didn't know.)

It's (as always) sunlit uplands round the corner, if we'll just soak up a bit of pain first. Then we'll never have had it so good.

No dear; You'll never have had it so good. And slimy Wes Streeting. And Slippery Kier Stamer. You lot will retire from politics with your futures assured, the 'Kercching!' of your personal tills ringing out even as you sleep. For the rest of us it will be shit. We'll get poorer while a new lot of barrel scrapers look for ways to wring the last dregs of the nation's wealth into their bank balances. Let's just for once be honest about it.

-----0-----

Last night I watched the 1984 war drama film Threads which (I'd guess for pretty obvious reasons) has been put up by the co producers, the BBC, on their i-player site in the last week or two.

A brutally realistic depiction of the lead up to and aftermath of a nuclear war, seen through the eyes of two families living in Sheffield (where a close by Nato base has recieved a direct hit), the uncompromising presentation of the initial devastation and subsequent social collapse is unrelenting and painful to watch.

One striking aspect of the drama, presented as a docu-drama with occasional over narration by an emotionless BBC style presenter, was just how rapidly the planning of the state fell apart, in terms of provision of emergency services to the surviving population. What should have been the lifeline thrown to the panicked and broken remains of the society, rapidly descended into those with the power (and guns) effectively taking what little food and rations for themselves, under the justification that 'they were the ones who needed it to rebuild the system'. They were of course, just looking after themselves because they could.

I don't need to go into the horror of this production here - if you want to see it, it's on the BBC i-player and also (I think) available free on YouTube. It's a grim nightmare with no happy ending, that was made as accurately as possible as things would likely be, given the state of preparations of the day. There is no reason to believe that things would be any better today were the worst to happen. But the question for me is why the BBC has chosen to screen it now (other than the obvious, that we're closer to the event happening than we probably ever have been before, with the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis). Or perhaps I should ask, what is it that the BBC hopes to achieve by this screening on its 'on demand' service?

My hope would be that they hope that some of our decision makers take the trouble to watch it. It would certainly focus their minds on exactly the risks they take with every little incremental provocation and escalation they endorse. This would seem to me to be the spirit in which it should be shown. If it's simply there to frighten people, then it's poorly done. People don't deserve to be terrorised by their state broadcasting service just for viewing figures or sensationalist impact. It's not fair (and they did enough of it during the covid scandal). There has to be a positive value to be gained from such a screening other than just its misery-porn one.

I'm very worried that we have a generation of MPs who aren't old enough to remember the effects of nuclear weapons usage, for whom the words are just ephemeral, with no substance. They should be made to see the dramatic docu-drama as an absolute prerequisite of stepping into the House and voting on any issues that are relevant to our current dangers. As to our government, they should also be obliged to sit and watch it as part of their introductory briefing to their roles. All of them.

God help us if our leaderships don't realise where their decisions could take us; I mean really realise.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

Tax more. Borrow more. Spend more. That's the general summing up.

Classic Labour stuff from Chancellor Reeves in yesterday's budget - the first from a Labour Chancellor for fifteen years - but don't let people kid you that the Conservatives, had they remained in power, would have done any different. This country is so down on its arse, that tax rises were on the cards whoever won the last election, and borrowing to rebuild the shattered public services was an absolute guarantee as well, if a level of deprivation that would threaten to have people out on the streets was to be avoided.

So it's all going just to plan. The Tories are out of office so they can throw their hands up in cod-horror at Labour's 'extravagance'. The (changed, new or whatever you want to call it) Labour arm of the UniParty gets to do what it has to, nice-cop, nasty-cop style, and the show goes on. And all of that money - borrowed and raised in taxes - where do you think that (once it has been poured into, and filtered through, the public services) ends up? Why - back in the hands of the richest people in the country where it belongs. Who runs the outsourcing companies of the private financing initiatives? Who owns the companies that bet the huge building and repair contracts on hospitals and schools. Even the increased monies of the minimum wage and the increased pay to public sector workers filters upwards through their mortgage payments, rent payments and the products they buy, essential or otherwise, back, ultimately, into the pockets of a few extremely rich and powerful individuals. What goes around comes around, and what we saw yesterday was just the second act in a play where all the players, pre-election and post, were acting from the same script. And each one knows that what they've done is to just give the plate another spin to keep it going just a fraction longer, before it comes crashing down.

But that's all they needed to do. Because in so doing they maintain the facade, however more briefly for, that we have a future as a wealthy nation, that we are not totally and completely and irreversibly screwed. That, contrary to the song, the only way is down. And needless to say while they spin the plate, a goodly portion of the dregs that remain stuck to it spin off into their pockets, for them to enjoy elsewhere when the pantomime is over.

More money for the one percenters, more money for their facilitators in Westminster, down the tubes for the plebs. That's a better summing up, I'd say.

-----0-----

Worth noting that (if what I heard on a YouTube discussion yesterday is correct) that nearing ome million of Israel's Jewish population has upped sticks and left Israel since the current situation began on October 7th of last year.

I've tried to verify this figure but could only get as far as a report in the Israeli Times (sorry if I've got that name wrong - memory issues and all that) reporting that 550,000 had left in the first 6 months of the conflict. On this basis, and given what has transpired since the six month point, it doesn't seem unreasonable to give the figure some credence.

Of a total Jewish population of nearing 8 million, this is no small percentage. Of course we can't say how many will return once the conflict is resolved, but it is something of an irony that Israel was supposedly created in the first place as a safe-haven for the Jewish people, so badly persecuted over the centuries in Europe, culminating in the atrocity of the Holocaust, but now finds itself hemorrhaging people as a result of the dangers they face within their own homeland.

And I'm afraid that it'll likely only get worse.

Many IDF soldiers have been on active duty in Gaza for a year without a break, and now with the crisis extending to include southern Lebanon it doesn't look as if they are going to get much respite. The type of hostilities they are involved in in both places are not those which they are made up to deal with. The usual modus operandi of the Israeli forces is massive air and rocketry bombardment, followed by short mopping up operations. Not grueling hands on contact with an intractable enemy. The threat of mobilisation into the armed forces will see many choose the option of leaving Israel before this happens.

Yet others will suddenly find that their homes are under threat, that their safe enclave is safe no more. They will understand that Netenyahu, far from dealing with the threats against them, has instead led them into a dark place that they would be better off away from. The 60 plus thousand people driven from their homes in the north are not being able to return to them; on the contrary, Hezbollah shows no sign of letting up on its bombardment and the IDF seems unable to stop them from continuing to fire their rockets. They will, in the face of this reality, begin to leave Israel, potentially for good. It was fine to be there when they ran the show - now not so good.

And this, if the conflict is allowed to continue, will quite possibly be Israel's undoing. The Jewish population there has in almost all cases, connections within other countries which they can fall back on, and if the circumstances get too bad they will simply leave for better opportunities elsewhere. And thus could the Zionist project simply wither away by attrition of the population until it is simply unviable. This is a real risk, and one that the leadership must be painfully aware of. That much vaunted biblical connection is big - but not so big. In a secular world of modernity, the taking up of life threatening burdens for religious reasons when good alternative strategies offer themselves.......well, need I say more. The modern generations, Jewish or otherwise, are not like the old ones that existed when the original Zionist settlers first moved to Palestine. The cause of Jewish statehood might seem less important to them than their own survival.

Thus has the Israeli policy of refusal to engage with the Palestinian problem other than to try and crush it been a dubious one. It has led them to a place where, rather than having a solid neighbour that it could (for all their differences) built up ties with and made a collective future, it is threatening their very existence altogether. A sad situation for a people who deserve better.

And I finish with one salient question that I heard posed somewhere during the week. At what point, given that we assert the right of the Israeli people to have a state within the lands that they have occupied for the last hundred years, do we deny the Palestinians the same right on the lands that they have occupied for a thousand?
Song of the year. Judy Raindrop. Everyone is a cunt except me.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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What Do You Think Today?

Post by peter »

It seems that the fallout from Chancellor Rachel Reeves' budget is kicking in as UK markets react to her big tax, borrow and spend program.

After a nervous few days, yesterday UK borrowing costs rose to almost Liz Truss mini-budget levels and share prices fell. Ten year borrowing settled at 4.43 percent having earlier reached a high of 4.5 (cf the Truss peak of4.65).

This caused Reeves to take to the airwaves in an attempt to settle things down. She held an interview on Bloomberg in which she stressed that financial stability was going to be the order of the day in her Chancellorship, with the emphasis on growth. (She avoided saying, Growth, Growth, Growth," which I suppose was a blessing of sorts, because if she had we'd have known it was bollocks.)

Unfortunately the Office for Budgetary Responsibility didn't agree with her. The forecasts for growth are lukewarm at best, with most seeing the economy limping along at pretty much where it currently is. More alarmingly, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that if she were to avoid another bout of austerity in public services, she would be forced to raise yet a further 9 billion pounds at least, at a later point in the parliamentary term. The markets absolutely didn't like the idea of money being borrowed to be poured into public service pay increases, and reacted by dumping UK assets by the truck-load. Consequently share prices, gilts and the value of the pound tanked, much as they had following the Truss mini-budget debacle. It wasn't quite as bad as that - some commentators were at pains to say that the same levels of turbulence in the markets as following Truss and Kwarteng's outing were not expected, but still it was a sticky sort of day, and one that will not have left the Chancellor feeling relaxed.

All very well standing on the steps of Number 11 with the old red 'box' held out and looking like a cat who'd got the cream: different when the markets react to the plate-spinning act you are attempting to pull off by booing from the stalls and unloading tickets for your next shows. Not so nice at all.

But potentially the bigger threat to the Stamer and Reeves show is the farmers reaction to the increase in inheritance tax that the latter announced in her budget. This impacts them big-time, because of course the value of land being what it is, the handing on of a farm from one generation to the next represents a major inheritance. The tax incurred would likely cause most of the beneficiaries to have sell of at least a portion of the land, if not the whole farm, to meet the death duties. This has understandably caused outrage amongst the farming community and they are reacting in their usual vigorous style. Threats of 'strike' action are grumbling around, prompting nervousness about the food security of the nation were such action to be taken. Not a situation that the Labour leadership will want to find itself in, and this will be a big behind-the-scenes conversation in cabinet. It's low key at the moment, but I'll have a punt; watch it grow in the days ahead. Reeves might even be forced to make some adjustments to her inheritance tax changes to accommodate for this vital sector of the economy.
Song of the year. Judy Raindrop. Everyone is a cunt except me.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
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