Rayvin

And Toontastic makes some more predictions about the imminent collapse of a Tory government Maybe you're right. You definitely should be right. But genuinely, I will believe it when I see it - I think they'll give her more than enough rope to ruin the country before they get rid of her.

Less than the dollar... And you guys all thought crypto was volatile. My crypto holdings are soaring in value against the £ atm

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/sep/28/uk-house-prices-predicted-fall-mortgage-interest-rate House prices predicted to drop 10%. That would be a silver lining for me if I could actually get anyone to give me a mortgage - but since I'm self employed I rather imagine that I'll be priced out by considerations other than actual house price.

While in full agreement of the overall thrust of this point, I would like to note that being published is a requirement for PhDs in most places and certainly very normal. It seems to have been published by Cambridge themselves which is again, fairly normal. It does however mean that no commercial publisher that I can see picked it up, and so I would expect that it was published as a formality once they determined to grant him his degree. As such, being published as a book here isn't noteworthy in terms of how academically poignant the work is (although the PhD itself would be). I note that the PhD is about the debasement of currency in the 1600s. Maybe that's where he's planning to take us back to.

Don't think the IMF realise who they're messing with here tbh. We're a fully sovereign nation, newly independent from the economic shackles of the EU. Britannia is unchained, we have boundless potential. To quote a famous Tory wordsmith, the IMF need to shut up and go away.

Superb article - the EU is stronger than us because of their internationalist nature, the ECB is more able to respond to what is going on than the BoE because it is simply more powerful. Long may the glorious truth rain down upon the bullshit of Brexit and it's damnable acolytes.

Could be any number of potential bad faith actors tbh.

I agree Starmer was absolutely right to kill this dead before it had legs to run with. We can't afford this nonsense, the country is utterly fucked for quite possibly the rest of our lives if we do not remove these dangerous cretins from office.

It is a ridiculous statement for her to have made - the left really need to understand that this is more about class than it is about race or gender. Class has always been the common denominator and the founding principle of inequality. Obviously that doesn't mean everything is peachy with the other areas but come on. Moreover, class is the one thing we could actually unite around properly!

It means she considers economics to be primarily racial rather than class based - therefore Kwarteng is a race traitor who is primarily keeping down other black people.

But under PR, would it ever have come to that in the first place? May wouldn't have been able to pursue her hardline approach to Brexit, it would have been a Norway style model, everyone would have been able to accept that, the nation could have healed.

Ok I accept now that this is another one of those arguments where we all agree on everything but furiously debate it anyway

It's the one thing I'd support bringing back the death penalty for. Lying while in office. Too extreme? The Tories have killed hundreds of thousands with their policies over the years - this should not be shrugged off if they're doing it off the back of lies and corruption. In both of those opportunities, the majority voted against the ruling party, voted against it's main manifesto promises, and yet have had to accept the most extreme, hardline policies. We had a 52:48 Brexit referendum that resulted in the most furiously right wing Brexit imaginable. Johnson's 2019 victory saw Remain parties receive more votes than Brexit parties. This is not democratic. Yes there was more than just one issue on the ballot and yes that is the system we have that everyone votes within, but what we are saying here is that not only do we have a period of 5 years of absolute, unchecked power - tyranny - we have it given to a party that best plays a flawed voting system that doesn't actually even reflect the desires of the majority of the people of the country, all of whom go entirely without representation in policy-making every time this happens. It is ludicrous.

IMO we live in a dictatorship with a 5 year reset. We have absolute tyranny for 5 years where politics runs roughshod over everyone who didn't vote for the prevailing party, where leaders and manifestos can be changed and altered without recourse multiple times within that window, and where authoritarian control seeks to bend reality and information as it sees fit. Nothing about the way government has been run since 2016 has felt remotely democratic. It's been a coup d'etat by hardline nutjobs with the right wing press giving them the same sort of cover that Putin relies on in Russia to get his 'electoral victories'.

And it would work.

This does not bode well for me, although I suppose the last thing I'm going to want to do is lock in at the high end. Maybe I should start backing the government here, they keep pushing it up and deliver that housing crash, I might even benefit from it. I'm not actually callous enough to wish that on everyone who has homes though, so I hope it doesn't happen. But fucking hell, I don't know what chance I've really got on the property front at this point Might just go on holiday instead.

I think we get one chance to avert this - the next GE has to be a Labour win, and it has to bring in PR. Labour winning with no PR means a further decade of the Tories after that term - Labour failing to win means there'll be nothing left to save.

This is it though isn't it, this is what proves that the people voting Tory almost to a man IMO, don't actually have the slightest fucking clue what they're voting for or what it means in reality.

This has to be starting to grate with those Tories who are a bit less self absorbed though - they're watching morons ruin the country. There has to be a growing number of them for whom lines in the sand are being crossed, surely

Something to cheer people up a bit - Darren Grimes has deleted every twitter post on his account (including the one calling King Charles a clown) and has apparently been sacked by GB News, whose HR team forgot to tell him. Thus, he found out himself through Twitter. I'm sure he's not gone, but he's been humiliated, and that's something.

How many replacements do the party of stability and economic competence get before the decent thing becomes to call a GE?

This narrative needs to be resisted by absolutely all of us, very vocally, permanently. We must never shut up about the absolute garbage that the Tories have created here. We must be relentless in holding truth up to people. Crazy as that sounds, that's what it'll take. Silence and they get away with it. Same as fucking austerity.

Russia are playing?

I am - was/hopefully still am going to move back to Newcastle. It's been a weird few years and I am really ready to go back home.

I was planning to buy my first house around the turn of the year - working 6 days a week at the moment to add that bit extra that I needed. The stamp duty component will do nothing for me, but the interest rate hike is going to make it all the more difficult. It's hard to stay motivated that there's a better life worth working for at times, frankly.