Midweek 22nd January 2025

242 Responses to Midweek 22nd January 2025

1. pugnazious says:

   January 22, 2025 at 11:19 pm

   It is remarkable that as Wrecker Reeves & Co tear up planning laws to enable builders to concrete over Britain and are eager to increase planet destroying flight capacity at Heathrow there is barely a peep out of the BBC….of course they support Labour almost regardless but it must indicate that they realise how much trouble the economy is in and that reality strikes….maybe nut zero can be put on the back-burner…solar powered of course.

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2. pugnazious says:

   January 22, 2025 at 11:25 pm

   ‘The great lie of British politics is that there is no alternative, that all parties should be the same, that the Labour-Lib Dem-Tory consensus of the past few decades is the only sensible or moral way forward.

   Trump 2.0 has exposed the idiocy of this approach.’

   From the Telegraph….worth a read….not anything you would ever see on the BBC….it doesn’t do ‘reality’ ironically despite it’s ‘reality check’…and of course it is the BBC and other media that has forced the Partys into the ‘centre ground’ and for them to lose all their founding principles and character.

   ‘Britain is being systematically lied to by our delusional political elite’
   ‘

   Britain is cooked. Thirty years of malgovernment, ideological derangement and relentless self-sabotage have ruined us. We are careering towards quasi-bankruptcy, our international reputation shot, our society fractured, our citizens impoverished, unhealthy and demoralised, our public sphere strewn with litter, and our institutions discredited. Crime and disorder are at intolerable levels. Those who can are fleeing.

   Little of value is ever built, and certainly not enough homes or infrastructure. Our energy costs are the highest in the world, and blackouts loom. Goods, services, housing, transport and healthcare are rationed by government fiat, and congestion, over-regulation, bureaucracy and propaganda grind down anybody with any ambition, courage or creativity.

   We are craving a hard reset, but Keir Starmer, our worst prime minister in fifty years, is doubling down on the toxic mix of socialism, class warfare, uncontrolled and often low-grade migration, confiscatory taxation, net zero extremism, regulatory zealotry and woke nihilism that has brought Britain to its knees. He is the ultimate non-player character, unable to imagine a different way forward, convinced of his righteousness as Britain races towards fiscal armageddon.

   The scale of the catastrophe appears belatedly to be dawning on Rachel Reeves. The Chancellor is bigging up a trade deal with China, signalling her support for expanding Heathrow and seeking to speed up infrastructure projects. Such granular initiatives make sense, but don’t amount to a coherent plan, let alone a diagnosis of our pathologies: they are panic moves from a clueless administration whose tax raids and attacks on business have trashed the economy.

   We have been living beyond our means since the financial crisis, convinced that we can go on spending on the NHS, benefits and triple-locked pensions while embracing every policy guaranteed to deliver reduced growth. We have vilified capitalism, risk-taking, money-making, the rich and bankers, and embraced virtue-signalling and wokeism. Many of our fellow citizens believe that the state owes them a living. Yet the maths don’t add up. Zero growth in GDP – our new self-inflicted normal – combined with 2-3pc growth in public spending leads to IMF bailouts.

   Some hoped socialism could “work” if combined with a massive increase in the labour supply. Yet the desperate, anti-democratic experiment with extreme levels of migration has failed, in social as well as economic terms: it hasn’t boosted productivity, GDP per capita is falling and too many of the recent arrivals will end up taking out more from the welfare state that they will pay in tax.

   Barring a miracle, the UK is at most two years away from a 1970s-style fiscal implosion; we are facing what Ray Dallio calls a “debt death spiral” even before Donald Trump forces us to spend more on defence, or imposes tariffs on UK exports if we persist in waging tax and regulatory war on US companies.

   The great lie of British politics is that there is no alternative, that all parties should be the same, that the Labour-Lib Dem-Tory consensus of the past few decades is the only sensible or moral way forward.

   Trump 2.0 has exposed the idiocy of this approach. The President’s agenda for renewal is astonishingly radical, and may establish him as one of the most consequential Presidents. Britain’s only hope is to copy almost all of his reforms, minus the protectionism against friendly states or the attempts at grabbing new territory.

   Trump has signed hundreds of executive orders or other proclamations in his first few days. He has announced a massive expansion of every kind of energy production: he understands that growth since the industrial revolution has been driven by abundant cheap fuel, and low cost electricity is essential for AI, data centres and tech firms (Starmer’s hopes to boost AI in the UK are doomed for that very reason).

   Trump wants to mine and drill and exploit natural resources. He is pulling out of the Paris agreement – which is ignored by emerging economies – and terminating federal laws forcing the adoption of electric cars. He supports clean tech, but only in the context of choice and market competition, not top-down green central planning. He has imposed a moratorium on new regulations of all kinds, and wants to introduce a one in, ten out rule.

   Reeves’ recent China trade announcement amounted to $600 million over five years; Trump has already unveiled an AI private sector investment project worth $500 billion. The US under Trump is entering a new boom, led by machine learning, driverless cars, massive medical progress and the commercial exploitation of space. He is abandoning or reversing all of Biden’s anti-billionaire, anti-Silicon Valley measures; his strategy is to outgrow America’s own fiscal woes and unfounded liabilities, and he is determined to entrench a pro-growth tax system. He is pro-legal skilled migration, but is launching the greatest crackdown in history against illegal migrants and South American gangs. He wants to shrink the size of the US state, break the Blob and force civil servants to work for, rather than against, elected governments. He has banned working from home for federal employees.

   He aspires to turn the US workforce into a high-performance meritocracy again, a move that could unleash another tidal wave of productivity. That will require reembracing Martin Luther King’s dream of a colourblind society. In the most stunning move of his presidency to date, Trump rescinded Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 – which led to the establishment of “affirmative action” and “positive discrimination” – and has immediately banned federal contractors and federally-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination.

   He has suspended – prior to sacking – every single DEI HR federal employee. It’s an enormous shift, a true revolution. Trump also wants to rescue students from critical race theory, which has encouraged anti-Semitism and anti-Asian racism. One order instructs the federal government to investigate DEI at “institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion.” Another demands the expulsion from the US of anti-American extremists, including students. We can but imagine how strong the USA could become if its best and brightest ceased being indoctrinated in nihilistic ideas, and were encouraged instead to think freely.

   The ideological gulf, and difference in prospects, between the UK and the US has never been so great. Britain has a choice: we can double down on our mistakes, and race towards miserable irrelevance, or we can swallow our pride and learn from Trump. Which will it be?’

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