ArtSums

[ArtSums @ArticleSums]

Makerfield prediction:

Reform 37-43
Labour 41-45

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Video footage posted recently by the YouTube channel Project Fear, filmed near Area 51 at the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), appears to have captured a new sixth-generation fighter aircraft, possibly the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD), known more commonly as the Boeing F-47.

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@YouGet1ShotAtIt it is about wanting a Palestinian state, it's just that the Palestinians and most Arabs have been unwilling to accept that the land taken from them isn't going to be returned

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@robprogressive no-one forces anyone to go to university

9% of pay over the threshold is more than manageable

and what should the amount be tied to if not inflation?

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@joshsimonsmp net zero

a high minimum wage

ridiculous employment laws

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@benhoobs you don't really believe this

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@herevvego astute observation

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@MittensOff lol

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@TedUrchin funny but not true

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@Danjsalt Their PR system blocks them from power unless they get over 50%

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@the_doctor_8th @ryan_murton @AndyBurnhamGM @vicderbyshire Fair, but if he's unprepared, he shouldn't be triggering a leadership election

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@catdeans @denbypottery They're shutting down because of high energy and high labour costs

Energy and labour cost a lot because of insane net zero and employment policies

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@BladeoftheS well, our taxes aren't going towards the salaries of CEOs

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@hopskipjumpy @kateferguson4 i think otherwise. but we'll see

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@hopskipjumpy @kateferguson4 will be a lot closer than people currently think

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@legalimmigran1 @kateferguson4 how does standing up and fighting back make you weak?

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@kateferguson4 Good on him

[John Rentoul @JohnRentoul]

Natasha Irons, the Labour MP for Croydon East, said she was “proud” that the government was “putting passengers before profit” by bringing railway companies into public ownership.

It was a revealing moment in PMQs this week, because it was so unremarkable. A Labour MP sloganised meaninglessly about “profit” being the enemy of customer service and no one noticed.

Keir Starmer replied that he too was “proud” that her constituents are travelling on rail services that are now “back in public ownership”, and no one batted an eyelid.

The PM assumed that everyone agrees that public ownership is better than a competitive market because that is what the voters think, according to superficial opinion polls.

Worse, he boasted that some of Irons’s constituents were “benefiting from the first freeze in rail fares for 30 years”. If he had said that rail travellers, who tend to be better off, are being subsidised even more by taxpayers, who are on average poorer than they are, the cheers of Labour MPs might have been less noisy.

But no, the surrender to magic money-tree economics is so complete that it passed without comment. No one rose to demand, “Did the old Clause IV die in vain?” No one asked if Tony Blair had gone to all that trouble to expunge the commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” from Labour’s constitution for nothing.

Labour’s reflex hostility to profit is back, and it is one of the underlying causes of the government’s failure. Starmer and Rachel Reeves presented themselves as pro-business, but they didn’t mean it. Not really, deep down. They had not done the hard thinking in opposition that Blair forced the party to do by rewriting Clause IV, setting out the party’s “aims and values” in its constitution, to understand what a “dynamic economy” involved.

So when they had to choose which taxes to put up, they went for taxes that burdened businesses, stifling wealth creation and employment.

Now here comes Andy Burnham, offering to go through the whole sorry cycle all over again. He too says he is pro-business, and the skyscrapers of boomtown central Manchester give us some confidence that he might mean it.

He says Reeves’s rise in employers’ national insurance contributions “wasn’t the right decision” and he wants to “reconsider” it. Yesterday he told the Telegraph that he would “look again” at the inheritance tax rise on farmers.

But this admission of error was not accompanied by a return to economic realism. Far from it. It was part of a cynical vote-buying exercise: a promise of a 20 per cent cut in business rates on pubs. Never mind that it is unusual for a by-election candidate to make a formal announcement of a policy they would implement if they were prime minister, just ask: where is the money coming from?

In the case of the tax cut for pubs, Burnham went through the motions of being a serious candidate for government by saying it would be paid for by higher taxes on online giants such as Amazon and by cracking down on tax evasion. So, he proposes a 20 per cent cut in business rates for pubs instead of the 15 per cent cut announced by Reeves for next April, paid for by a combination of the unworkable and the imaginary.

As for employers’ national insurance and farmers, it is all “look at”, “revisit” and “consider”, with a wave of the hand in the general direction of the money tree. But renationalising Thames Water, also mentioned yesterday, seemed to be a firm promise. For the water industry as a whole, “public ownership is absolutely an option,” he said. But “for Thames Water, that is what should be done”.

As with the railways, public opinion is on his side – at the level of pop-quiz poll questions. But as Blair once explained, there is a difference between a three-second answer, a 30-second answer and a three-minute answer. People tend to say yes to any question about public ownership, but if the question includes the costs of nationalisation, the history of public-sector under-investment and whether ministers’ energy should be devoted to the complex legislation needed, the answers become less certain.

Nationalisation ought to be a pragmatic question – “the market where possible, the state where necessary”, as the German social democrats realised 67 years ago – but for too many in the Labour Party, it remains an article of faith 31 years after Blair’s teachable moment.

For Burnham, it betrays an instinct of hostility to profit, and an attachment to fantasy economics that augurs nothing good. Burnham’s alleged closeness to Ed Miliband, whose economically illiterate energy policy is one of the government’s more serious failings, is the opposite of reassuring.

It means Burnham may be able to put a happier and less sanctimonious face on Starmer and Reeves’s policies, but he is likely to make the actual policies worse.

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@EvEvangelist @wayve_ai @alexgkendall no

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@SueJonesSays @StevenD1977 @RobKenyonReform and no-one can get a job anymore

well done

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@ChrisMcDonaldMP the nhs budget has seen real-terms increases every year for the last 30

it's still shite