Steve Tanner 🇬🇧

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@SBarrettBar He shares my name (never understood how it became a first name in the first place) which now requires cleansing. Hang the cunt.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@WilliamsAdamUK A salient point, and also an argument to have even more politicians, to more accurately represent these villages. Maybe constituencies should be divided between urban and rural more. Just spit-balling ... I don't fucking know 😆

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

Notably, this is the opposite of what built the great companies of history

For example, famous chemicals company IG Farben was built not by short-termism but by an intentional decision to focus on what would add value for multiple generations, viewing the multi-generational nature of the company with pride and as a duty

David Landes, in his book Dynasties, notes this, writing, "When shareholders complained of stingy dividends, Carl Bosch, first chairman of IG Farben, reminded them of higher duties: 'IG is not here to give big profits to its stockholders. Our pride and our duty is to work for those who come after us, to establish the processes on which they will work.'"

Similarly, Andrew Mellon built Alcoa Aluminum to always think about what would be adding value well into the future, hence its deals with and relationship with the Niagara Power Company, for instance. As a result of planning and building for the long term, Alcoa survived both the Depression and the FDR regime, and powered the aerospace age. Such is how Mellon's family had acted since it arrived in America, going from a clan of poor Borderer farmers to one of the most important families of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through steady, non-speculative investments in banking, real estate, and industry. As a result of that farsightedness, Paul Mellon was able to bail out the military during the recent shutdown

And, on the more aristocratic side of things, Coke of Norfolk was the man whose agricultural experimentation and investments in "scientific agriculture" fed the country during the Industrial Revolution. He focused not on short-term squeezing of tenants, but on adding value for decades. He built nice homes to attract the best (and best capitalized) tenant farmers available, signed decades-long leases to encourage them to invest in the leased farms for the long term, held events like a sheep shearing that was famous nationally to encourage the best new agricultural methods and show off what his home farms had discovered, and much more. As a result, "high agriculture" became socially prestigious and Britain was fed. Coke himself ended up profiting handsomely over the long term, as the prosperity of his tenants meant he could raise rates even during Depression times when more rapacious landlords had to cut rents dramatically

Such is the benefit to long-termism, something increasingly forgotten in our managerial age that prioritizes the immediate over the future, not unlike the Congolese in Empire of Dust

[Ross Baglin @ross_baglin]

Crime is the great poll tax paid by all of us, except criminals, every day. The security guard in every grocery store. The security devices. The store “shrinkage” - all loaded into the prices paid by the honest citizen, to the toerag. The repair bills, graffiti removal, the despoiled public realm. The cost of police, and insurance, and courts, the personal distress.

It does not have to be so. This is an excellent read, and it shows how we can remove a major cost of living overhead. Politicians just have to care enough to do the hard and obvious thing.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:

We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.

We have rubbish police so we hire private security.

We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.

Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.

An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.

NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.

Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.

You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.

Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.

Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.

Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.

CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.

Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.

Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.

Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.

Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.

The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.

Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.

999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.

Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.

Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.

Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.

The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.

The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.

Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.

You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.

You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.

Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.

Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.

Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.

The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.

You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.

The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@adhib @Peter88902568 Or Ewedon ...

I'll get my coat.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@SarahForRuncorn A cheap shot and a midwit take.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Pollyanna Burnham has absolutely no idea what's about to happen to him. He has a head full of bad ideas that weren't tried by any of his recent predecessors, not because his predecessors were smarter than him, but because they were rapidly disabused before getting down to business. Burnham, though, thinks that bad ideas will become good ideas if he's the one implementing them. For Burnham, the normal laws of political reality do not apply. There are hard lessons for him behind the door of Number Ten, waiting like starved crocodiles for their hapless prey.

While this is going to be endlessly entertaining and wholly predictable for us politicos, it is not without consequence. This is the gear shift that pushes the "just about managing" into the "not managing" bracket. This is the turn that pushes businesses and households irrecoverably into the red and upends what people have been struggling to maintain. This is the narcissistic clueless meddling that puts the country into a death spiral. The anger will be palpable.

By that, I don't necessarily mean the sort of riots triggered by the tone-deaf and ineffably useless Starmer. That cannot be ruled out, of course, but this is the inflection point where the normally reserved, who just prefer to get on with their lives, are dragged into the wake turbulence against their will. It's the bill hike that obliterates the last of their disposable income. It's the last of the small pleasures that make the drudgery of making ends meet bearable denied - when there's no longer any reward for taking the punishment - and there's no end in sight.

This is when Burnham's entire psychological construct begins to dissolve. The world as he understands it is one where if you're nice, with good intentions, then you are liked - and the only reason you could dislike such a person is if you yourself are not nice. Starmer was better equipped to be hated because he had no empathy, and public sentiment of any kind had no bearing on his demeanour. Burnham, on the other hand, wants and needs to be liked. This is often a fatal flaw in politicians.

What makes Burnham especially dangerous is that he will pull at any and all levers in search of doing the nice thing, in order to be liked, oblivious to the second order consequences, and will be shocked, surprised and horrified to learn that his every action has the opposite of intended effect on public morale. He will not understand why. He is not capable of understanding why, even if it is explained to him in the most gentle terms by a compassionate softly-spoken primary school teacher.

Unlike, Starmer, though, he won't go into the bunker to hide. He will take it to mean that people just haven't gotten to know him yet, and need to see more of him so they can understand that he's a nice guy and on your side. And when it doesn't work, he will blame the interface layer. If we don't get it, it just means something is lost in translation. That's when nice turns nasty.

This is the hole he will keep digging, the scab he simply won't stop picking until the sore becomes an open wound. WHY WON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW NICE I AM?? They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Burnham, though, does not plan to build a road. He intends to drill directly to Hell with industrial tunnelling machines. There is no force of magic that can make socialism work.

Crucially, what Burnham doesn't understand, is that the Labour party has become the party of the status quo for a reason. There is nowhere else for the left to go. Tony Blair, for all his many faults, was smart enough to understand certain economic laws of gravity. He shitcanned socialism because he knew that you can't hope to help people if the state is broke. He rebuilt the state as a managerialist welfare dispensary.

That might have been a viable avenue for 1997. But "sharing the proceeds of growth" is contingent on actual growth, which is no longer possible in a hyper-regulated, high tax moribund economy. Blairism is as dead as socialism. The bottom line is that there is no left wing solution to what ails us.

Burnham, though, believes enough time has passed for us to have forgotten, so that we'll mistake old ideas for new ideas. A lot of people probably will fall for it again, but it doesn't take very long to relearn the lessons. The Finding Out stage happens faster each time. On that basis, Burnham is not a man who will make it to the next election intact. He doesn't have much to work with. He has no mandate, no fiscal headroom, limited political capital, and absolutely no talent. A man promoted to captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The only way for Burnham is down, down and down.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@ClarksonsFarm1 "There is no death for those that believe"

Rival Sons: Jordan

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@theworldofmomus He's dreadful. Cringeworthy comments towards Rooney at the end about his (I'm guessing) abstinence from booze.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@Babygravy9 Orange juice and cool air on my legs first thing in the morning and I'm as regular as a Labour Party policy flip-flop.

[DP @DPPolitical]

@Nigel_Farage Hi 👋

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@Peter88902568 To be honest, I have a PAWcity of interest in this match.

[East of England SDP @SDP_EoE]

Our leader is running for parliament in Clacton.

By refusing to stand, the establishment parties have completely failed Clacton. The SDP is stepping up to give Clacton a true choice.

We offer a real, patriotic alternative focused on rebuilding what matters most.

[Momus Najmi @theworldofmomus]

The best option in the upcoming by-election in Clacton is my good friend and leader of the Social Democratic Party @SDPhq, William Clouston @WilliamClouston. Of course I am biased on this one but you should really have a look at their policies and make an informed decision for your future:

Social Democratic Party https://t.co/vncK2eSHjh

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

I may have a few hours to kill in Frankfurt before my flight home next Monday. Any recommendations?

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

Worth watching the full interview, link in the comments to the OP.

[Social Democratic Party @SDPhq]

In 2 minutes, @WilliamClouston explains why the SDP's "tough but tender" approach beats Westminster's self-serving delusions.

Pretending the maths works isn't compassion. It only guarantees a harsher reckoning later.

The Age of Pretence must end.

Full interview 👇

[Social Democratic Party @SDPhq]

People argue about what size the state should be, but we ask what it's responsible for.

When you think of it like that, it becomes really simple:
✅ maintain the pitch
❌ don’t play on it

A serious economy needs a competent state: one that keeps the ground in order, the pitch playable and applies the rules fairly.

If you do that, then the people of Britain can play the game their own way. Raising a family. Building a business. Just getting on with your life.

What we’ve had recently is the opposite. We’ve had governments who
•⁠ ⁠let the pitch turn to mud
•⁠ ⁠asset-strip the stadium
•⁠ ⁠try to tell you how to play the game

So it makes perfect sense that some people want less government - they've watched it done badly for decades.

And it makes perfect sense that some people want more government - they've been left trying to play on a bog.

But a state that doesn't know its job - and doesn't do it for good of the nation - will do it badly at any size.

The issue is competency, not size.

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@Peter88902568

[Steve Tanner 🇬🇧 @SteveTanner_SDP]

@uncult_swine NWOBHM, cats and gravy.

Gravy always wins.