New Labour government - legislative agenda

[PR1Berske]

The joyous insanity of British politics: debates for hours on waffle, and by contrast, government spending totalling trillions nodded through without debate:

 

[Elpenor]

The joyous insanity of British politics: debates for hours on waffle, and by contrast, government spending totalling trillions nodded through without debate:

View attachment 434790

That stuff matters to parliamentarians more to quote Loom

 

[Kid_Eternity]

This is how it's been for over a century. Find me an MP who didn't lose the whip for voting against their own government's finance bill. There are rules and conventions in Parliament. MPs are free to break them, but there will be consequences for it. Compare it to the Maastricht vote.

Or just what do you think it means to vote against your own government on a confidence bill?

So much of the discourse around this miss this vital point.

 

[Pickman's model]

Yes, but they have a rather large number of voters who believe that they are. And where else would they go? The LibDems?

Not really. Not after 32 years of being told the Labour party is the party of businese

 

[Pickman's model]

So much of the discourse around this miss this vital point.

It's not voting against the government on the substantive issue, is it.

 

[two sheds]

The joyous insanity of British politics: debates for hours on waffle, and by contrast, government spending totalling trillions nodded through without debate:

View attachment 434790

Parkinson's Law of Triviality

The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself ...

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Encouraging

 

[PR1Berske]

"Crown Estate Bill" published

Link: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3739/publications

 

[Silas Loom]

"Crown Estate Bill" published

Link: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3739/publications

View attachment 434890

I hope this is part of strong-arming Chas into putting wind turbines all over his ill-gotten fields.

 

[PR1Berske]

Early prison release decision voted on:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2024-07-25/debates/67B4BB95-71F5-44D9-8C99-2AA55FF68A31/CriminalLaw

 

[Dystopiary]

Dreadful stuff coming from Liz Kendal, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. She's saying she wants to the DWP to move from “a department for welfare” to becoming “a genuine department for work”. It does look like she plans to make things even harder for people on disability benefits. Will be posting more tomorrow on the "campaign against welfare cuts and poverty" thread.

 

[Dogsauce]

Heres something they wont be doing...

Leveson Inquiry part two won’t go ahead, Culture Secretary suggests

Labour had previously backed going ahead with the second stage of the Levenson inquiry in 2018 under Jeremy Corbyn

inews.co.uk

"The second part was intended to examine unlawful conduct within media organizations and the relationship between the press and police but has been on hold since 2018."

It’s probably something they can hold out on as a potential stick to beat the press with if they start getting hostile or too Faragey. Stay in line or it goes ahead.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

I ran more benefits scenarios earlier. a 38 hour week on minimum wage makes you £400 better off than someone on UC (outside London - £200 inside). Very interested and concerned to see what a review into universal credit is going to suggest for making work pay.

Did you take into account commuting costs? Dividing £400 by 47 working weeks, (due to deducting annual leave), leaves £8.51 per week to cover commuting costs. That won't be enough to cover bus/tram/train fare or the cost of running a car. So people will, in reality, be worse off.

Yes, some people walk or cycle, so will have negligible costs, but even then, if you're walking to/from work everyday, you're probably going to be wearing out and buying more shoes. If you cycle, you might at the most basic level incur costs for repair and maintenance, fixing the odd puncture. But what about insurance? Or if you don't have insurance and your bike gets knicked, you'll have to cough up for a replacement so you can get to work.

What about lunches?

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

Or all the Labour MPs who all see reducing child poverty as an absolute priority and all keep telling us about how much they want to remove the cap but just aren't able to?

"of course we all want to reduce child poverty but, as the government, in control of all levers of the economy, with a huge majority and the ability to literally write the laws of the country we are, unfortunately, completely powerless to do anything until the public finances, which again we have full control over, allow it".

They're such duplicitous cunts.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

Dreadful stuff coming from Liz Kendal, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. She's saying she wants to the DWP to move from “a department for welfare” to becoming “a genuine department for work”. It does look like she plans to make things even harder for people on disability benefits. Will be posting more tomorrow on the "campaign against welfare cuts and poverty" thread.

I refer the honourable member to the answer I gave earlier.

 

[wtfftw]

Did you take into account commuting costs? Dividing £400 by 47 working weeks, (due to deducting annual leave), leaves £8.51 per week to cover commuting costs. That won't be enough to cover bus/tram/train fare or the cost of running a car. So people will, in reality, be worse off.

Yes, some people walk or cycle, so will have negligible costs, but even then, if you're walking to/from work everyday, you're probably going to be wearing out and buying more shoes. If you cycle, you might at the most basic level incur costs for repair and maintenance, fixing the odd puncture. But what about insurance? Or if you don't have insurance and your bike gets knicked, you'll have to cough up for a replacement so you can get to work.

What about lunches?

I didn't take into account anything. Just rough figures to conclude that both wages and benefits are far too low.

 

[two sheds]

The government pays a phenomenal amount of money to landlords who are charging extortionate rents. Rent controls would make a real difference to people on benefits and low wages and wouldn't inconvenience any landlords who bought their house 10 or 20 years ago (investments can go up or down I understand).

 

[wtfftw]

The government pays a phenomenal amount of money to landlords who are charging extortionate rents. Rent controls would make a real difference to people on benefits and low wages and wouldn't inconvenience any landlords who bought their house 10 or 20 years ago (investments can go up or down I understand).

Yeah true. LHA is set at 30th percentile of private rents so effectively an attempt to curb that cost by passing it on to claimants.

 

[two sheds]

... rather than the landlords who are raking it in

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Very welcome news.

Major change to UK minimum wage in Labour cost of living shake-up

For the first time the Low Pay Commision will have to factor in the cost of living when calculating the suggested level of the minimum wage under a new remit to be announced by Labour's Jonathan Reynolds

www.mirror.co.uk

 

[tommers]

Well. Who could have seen this coming?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-uk-finance-minister-accuse-last-government-multi-billion-pound-cover-up-2024-07-28/?taid=66a6c09177b864000120332b&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

They've "discovered" a "£20 billion black hole" in "Britain's finances" and the only answer is more austerity.

I'm fucking shocked.

 

[Silas Loom]

Well. Who could have seen this coming?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-uk-finance-minister-accuse-last-government-multi-billion-pound-cover-up-2024-07-28/?taid=66a6c09177b864000120332b&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

They've "discovered" a "£20 billion black hole" in "Britain's finances" and the only answer is more austerity.

I'm fucking shocked.

But they aren’t saying that the only answer is austerity. They’re quite clearly rolling the pitch for tax increases, likely CGT and inheritance.

 

[tommers]

But they aren’t saying that the only answer is austerity. They’re quite clearly rolling the pitch for tax increases, likely CGT and inheritance.

Will that raise £20 billion?

If it does then they can probably get rid of the "Office for Value for Money" that they want to create. And reverse the cuts to hospitals, roads and rail. That'll be good.

 

[Pickman's model]

But they aren’t saying that the only answer is austerity. They’re quite clearly rolling the pitch for tax increases, likely CGT and inheritance.

Yeh right. Do you think rises in cgt and iht will provide £20bn? But the magic money tree can provide £3bn per year for Ukraine while our hospitals etc go without.

 

[Silas Loom]

Will that raise £20 billion?

If it does then they can probably get rid of the "Office for Value for Money" that they want to create. And reverse the cuts to hospitals, roads and rail. That'll be good.

It looks as if transport capital projects like the Stonehenge tunnel will be axed, and there’s the usual bollocks about cutting non-essential consultants, as if Whitehall could work without contractors and contingent labour. Maybe £10bn in paper savings and £10bn in taxes? We’ll see soon enough.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Will that raise £20 billion?

If it does then they can probably get rid of the "Office for Value for Money" that they want to create. And reverse the cuts to hospitals, roads and rail. That'll be good.

Windfall taxes, new tax on shareholders, tweaks to inheritance tax…

 

[PR1Berske]

"Torsten Bell, the new Labour MP who used to run the Resolution Foundation thinktank and how is now parliamentary private secretary to Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has posted this on X saying it would be wrong to describe what Rachel Reeves is announcing today as cuts to public spending."

Public service notice (given lots of confused coverage this morning): you’re not “cutting public spending” if you’re not changing any budgets but instead revealing that the previous government announced transport schemes without the budgets to make them happen

 

[tommers]

Windfall taxes, new tax on shareholders, tweaks to inheritance tax…

Just out of interest I checked total inheritance tax revenues and it was £7.5 billion last year, which was a record high by some margin.

Inheritance tax receipts UK 2024 | Statista

Inheritance tax receipts in the United Kingdom amounted to approximately 7.5 billion British pounds in 2023/24, compared with 7.09 billion pounds in the previous financial year, which was a peak for this provided time period.

www.statista.com

 

[two sheds]

The last decade or so has seen the A30 road widening progress further and further into Cornwall with the current scheme costing £330 million. From what I've heard from drivers the main result has been to move the bottleneck further down into Cornwall.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Just out of interest I checked total inheritance tax revenues and it was £7.5 billion last year, which was a record high by some margin.

Inheritance tax receipts UK 2024 | Statista

Inheritance tax receipts in the United Kingdom amounted to approximately 7.5 billion British pounds in 2023/24, compared with 7.09 billion pounds in the previous financial year, which was a peak for this provided time period.

www.statista.com

Yep. And more to come, also expect fuel duty to be expanded to include EV (that’s a lucrative line of tax) in the coming years too…