Morning music
Talking point
She has a point.
As for Goodwin, I recently flagged the possibility, no more, that he might be on the following trajectory— win a by-election (Runcorn & Helsby?) as a Reform UK candidate, take over from Farage the leadership of Reform (with Farage’s support), and then (once Reform has become the largest party in the Commons after the next general election ) become Prime Minister.
It might just happen.
However, as that tweeter “Serena Brown” notes, either the UK becomes again a homogenous society, or it does not. There would be no point in a Reform UK government if it were unwilling to take the steps necessary.
This is not merely about immigration, and certainly not only about that relatively small part of immigration which comes in via the infamous “small boats”. It is about the non-whites already here, who are breeding much faster than the English/British, who themselves are not even reproducing their own numbers.
When we see Reform, we notice that it is ideologically in hock to the Jew-Zionist lobby, and pathetically adherent to Israel and Israeli interests.
Other tweets seen
I have blogged previously about the bad joke that is Shabana Mahmood as “Lord Chancellor” and Secretary of State for Justice— a Pakistani woman whose total legal experience has been a 12-month Bar pupillage (decades ago), followed by a year as a salaried “gopher” at a firm of solicitors. Use the search box on the blog to find out more.
Starmer-stein is not a Labour prime minister (even of the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown type); he is a Labour Friends of Israel prime minister, and that applies, mutatis mutandis, to virtually his entire Cabinet.
Starmer-stein and his Cabinet should face real resistance from the British people.
Meanwhile, Starmer-stein continues to try to play the “world statesman” and would-be war leader, and looks ever-more pathetic as he makes that attempt.
When simply noting the totally obvious sounds radical…
That influx of non-white doctors has another consequence: by reason of the high pay received by doctors in the UK, any offspring are automatically given a better life-chance than most white English/British children. The knock-on result is that more non-whites are going to be placed into the higher socio-economic groups in the UK, thus further weakening our civilized European culture and society.
Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalergi_Plan; https://www.amazon.com.be/-/nl/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi/dp/1913057097.
Exactly. Reform is the last hope of many, but it is also the last chance for the System itself to survive. If Reform is squashed or disappears, we are looking at quite likely civil war, or social war, and the national revolution, down the line. However, if Reform manages to be either the largest or second-largest party after 2028 or 2029, or even in government with a Commons majority, but then fails to take the steps necessary, we shall also be looking at not-unlikely civil/social war.
We must not forget that the Jew-Zionist element is embedded in Reform. One only has to look at the pronouncements of Farage, Tice, and now Goodwin.
Still, at present, Reform UK is the only game in town:
Hopefully, that little bully will be found and prosecuted, but of course his punishment, if any, will be slight, in the present society.
When the law ceases to be respected, or enforced (by reason of weak and/or politicized police, prosecutors, courts), such lawlessness leads, in the end, to the public taking the law into their own hands, and meting out more condign punishment to evildoers.
Not for nothing has “the Bailey” (Central Criminal Court, London) the following inscription on its facade: “Punish the evildoer, and protect the children of the poor“…
I agree, but it may be that Reform has to succeed but then crash and burn before a social-national movement (of any type) can arise.
It will be recalled how warmly Starmer-stein welcomed Farage into the chamber of the House of Commons for the first time.
Russian forces continue to advance on all fronts.
Former MP, member of the House of Lords, Conservative Party member. Quarter-Indian. Scribbles for Daily Telegraph.
Who makes up stupid rules like that anyway? Small-minded people who think that the natural world is not connected with humanity. Glad that those BBC people broke the “rules” laid down.
I often break rules, and feel good about doing so.
…and cretins of that sort (Mark Field, Liz Truss etc) purport to have the right (and ability) to rule over us. Wall. Squad. End.
My question is whether Goodwin himself is going to be the candidate…
If so, the date of the by-election will soon be set, maybe even tomorrow.
“The government says it wants to make significant savings on welfare payments to the disabled and help the disabled into work. The point, say all ministers – led Sir Keir Starmer – is not to harm the disabled, but to free them from a life of dependency. That, they claim, is why this is a truly “Labour” reform — and not just brutal cuts engineered by Rachel Reeves because she needs billions in savings so as not to breach arbitrary, self-imposed fiscal rules on the assessment date of 26 March. Is any of this plausible?
The first thing to say is the point of fiscal rules should be to help focus minds in government about how best to share scarce resources between different important resources. They should not set hard deadlines for making decisions with potentially profound consequences for the lives of millions of people.
We’ve already seen an example of the political dangers of trying to rush through changes to personal independence payments (PIP) and the health related elements of universal credit – because one element that was particularly upsetting to Labour MPs has already been dropped, namely a one year freeze on PIP payments.
But as my colleague Anushka Asthana has been exclusively disclosing for the last ten days, this was only one part of the welfare reform package. The other elements were to restrict entitlement to personal independence payments, while cutting the health-related universal credit payments and recycling those UC savings into an increase in the standard rate of UC. You can see in this the simple story and perhaps simplistic story about welfare payments to the disabled that the government believes and is trying to tell.
First, that hundreds of thousands of people receive cash to help with their living and mobility costs, but don’t “deserve” it.
Second, that the structure of UC payments provides too great an incentive to disabled people to sign themselves off work to get the health-related benefits top up.
Starmer will doubtless take comfort from the fact that – according to polling by the Good Growth Foundation – 60% believe the system provides too much support to people who don’t want to work and 39% think that it’s too easy for people to get benefits who don’t need them. But popular belief does not make it true. And before going further into the nitty gritty, it is worth doing a quick economic reality check. It is a fact that the proportion of British people in employment has fallen since Covid and, unlike many other rich economies, has not recovered to 2019 levels. But the proportion of British people who are working remains high by international standards. According to the OECD, in the third quarter of 2023 the UK ranked fifth in the world, with an employment rate of 74.9%, well ahead of the US for example, and behind only Iceland, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany
Even if it is a laudible ambition to encourage more people into work. The UK’s is not an economy whose failure is that too few people are working. The grotesque failure of the British economy is hardly a mystery.
It is that living standards for those in work have barely increased for more than 15 years and too many of those in work receive too little to pay even for food, energy and other essentials.
Pretty much every competitor country whose employment rate has recovered to pre-covid levels has higher productivity and higher wages than the UK. Which might tell you that Britain’s problem is not that its benefit system is skewiff but that it’s the labour market itself that is broken, that remunerated toil in Britain delivers inadequate incentives. And by the way, we don’t have a benefit system in the UK that is remotely generous or lavish by international standards.
Research published only last week by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showed that we spend less on welfare as a share of GDP than the average for developed nations.
Also when it comes to the so-called replacement rate – what any unemployed person receives as a proportion of earnings from employment – only the unemployed in Australia and the US receive less.
Unemployment payments are significantly higher everywhere else in Europe, for example.
And another thing. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown, standard universal credit does not cover the costs of basics and essentials, for families or single people. “Ah ha!” you may exclaim, especially if you are the PM or chancellor. Surely this proves that there is a unhealthy incentive in the UC system for any claimant to prove that he or she has “limited capacity for work or work related activity” – to be diagnosed as unfit for work – so that their UC entitlements would go (for a single person) from £400 to £823, a month. But is an extra £106 a week the kind of incentive that would persuade a vulnerable person to permanently shut down their availability for work?
And if it were cut and partly offset by a rise in standard universal credit – which is what Starmer plans – would that persuade the vulnerable person to look for jobs?
That doesn’t feel compelling as an argument – especially in a world where most employers are reluctant to employ disabled people, let alone retain them on their books.
So another concern about the timing of these welfare changes is they come well before the findings of an equally important government review, that by former John Lewis boss Charlie Mayfield about how employers can be helped to retain and hire disabled people. Later this week he will publish his “discovery” document, about why employers struggle to keep in employment those who start to feel unwell, especially those suffering from mental ill-health. However Mayfield is still months away from recommendations.
In other words, it feels cart-before-horse to take cash from the disabled before a new support system is in place for employers to keep on their books those who are struggling.
As for the proposal to increase the threshold for those claiming the PIP, this will have an impact both on new claimants and those in receipt who are subject to review. How many disabled people could see their PIP payments reduced or withdrawn altogether?
Very large numbers indeed, according to the Resolution Foundation if it remains the Treasury’s aim to find net savings of up to £6bn by 2029-30. Louise Murphy of the Foundation estimates that more than 600,000 people, most on low incomes, would lose £675 a month on average.
Obviously this is all still hypothetical. Proper judgement awaits publication of the Liz Kendall’s policy paper tomorrow. But a change in entitlement on that magnitude will generate massive anxieties in those who both receive PIP and may need it in future.
None of this is to argue that any government should ignore the forecast that on current trends the cost of PIP is set to rise by £15bn by 2029 or that large numbers of especially young people are being excluded by disability from the world of work too young. It is to suggest that reforms that could reduce benefit bills in the long run will require large expenditure in the short term on mental health provision, skills, rewiring coaching and job search at the DWP, occupational health support for companies and so on.
A rational approach would see the costs of supporting the disabled rise in the short term. It would be an investment programme, not a cuts programme. With the supposedly all-important fiscal assessment looming, we’ll see if that’s what Starmer , Kendall and Reeves unveil. 2/2“
[Robert Peston]
A long comment, but important.
For me, the answer to all this a a “basic income” system, whereby all citizens (note, citizens, not any African or Afghan or similar just off the boat) get some modest amount of income regardless of any factor such as contribution, need, or “deservedness”.
That would also save vast amounts by enabling the shutdown of 95% of the DWP bureaucracy.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 