Who am I?

I met Ruth Perry several times. I know the school well and if I lived in that area I would happily send my kids there. She was a kind, hard working and talented woman who did a great job and was loved by the kids and parents of the school. You are one hundred percent utterly ******ing wrong in your statement.

Exactly. House prices going up? They and their friends have lots of those. Not a problem. Food prices going up? They and their friends can afford to eat out and pay 100 quid for a steak. 115 quid is no big deal. Energy prices going up? Small issue for their friends as it impacts their running costs, but they can just raise their prices and take more from the plebs so no big deal. Employee wages going up? THE HORROR. Their mates have lots of those employees. And it's an ongoing cost. Going to cost them a fortune. Better sort it out quick.

They can have the same 'help' and advice all my house owning friends have given me in the last 15 years every time rent has been bumped. Move somewhere cheaper.

Nope. Maybe I'm completely wrong and they stay up at night worrying about whether a 3 bed semi in Dartford is worth 20 percent more or less than last month, but it seems a bit odd to me if they are. If you're a person who owns 5 percent of the land in Scotland and large estates in England then I would have thought you'd be completely insulated from even decadel movement in land value.

I'm not sure truly wealthy you are talking about care that much about the land value. Their wealth is so vast that plus or minus even fifty percent on their land isn't that big a deal. They might need to change a few plans and put a few things on hold, but the amount of land they have is power in itself. The amount they can sell it for isn't the main value of the land.

Taking a risk to set up a business is a good thing and should be encouraged. If it goes wrong you shouldn't be bailed out, but as soon as you can get back on your feet you should be encouraged again. People who create are the driving force of any country. Without risk there is no advancement. I agree with everything else you said though. Just wanted to point out that setting up a business is different from all the other things you listed.

That's just silly. Labour are a viable political party with relatively mainstream and considered ideas. You might disagree with them politically but they're not idiots who's first budget will cause conniptions in the market. The markets won't have a problem with a labour win. Even though most of the market movers won't be happy since they are unlikely to be voting for them. The markets are made up of actual adults. Unlike the current government. Same as with Mr c unt in charge. Can't stand him, but he's not a moron who will drive the bus off a cliff because he's chasing magic unicorns. There's not even anything inherently wrong with Truss's plan, although I vehemently disagree with the idea it would work. The issue was the plan was drawn in crayon and then they ate the crayons. If they had properly costed tax decreases and done it over time, with 'efficiencies' the markets would have been fine. The markets didn't have a problem with the politics. They had a problem with the complete failure of sensible implementation.

No, I mean someone needs to be able to oppose labour. I didn't mean the Tories are the current opposition to government. Although they're not really government at the moment are they? The wheels have completely fallen off. What I meant was any political party needs opposition to counterbalance it. Without competing ideas we get stagnation and failure. Which I'd argue is what is actually happening here. My personal opinion is that labour is so crap it is no longer a counterbalance to the Tories, which has let them go completely off the rails.

If we got that much of a wipeout of the Tories then they'd probably be finished as a political party. It's never good to have a one party system. Even if you generally agree with the party in charge. You can't hold them accountable at all. Having said that, we don't currently have a functioning opposition to labour so something needs to change. Maybe the Tories do just need to cease to exist so they can be rebuilt into something worthwhile. I tend to say the same thing about labour though. We need PR in this country desperately. FPTP is no longer working due to both parties completely locking up the political system. We need fresh blood.

I think Brexit is the perfect example of where PR is needed. I don't personally care if we are in or out of the EU. You can make an argument either way. But it hasn't been dealt with. If we had PR then Brexit would not have been built up as some massive issue. Some, maybe many, of the issues people had (immigration etc) would have been dealt with over time by third parties forcing the issues earlier. Maybe that would have been enough and people would not have wanted to leave the EU. Or maybe not. But it would have been dealt with slowly and (vaguely) sensibly. Under FPTP the issues were purposefully ignored by both main parties until the pressure got so large it exploded in both their faces. Our broken FPTP system allowed that to build. It did everything it could to disenfranchise people it disagreed with until half the voting population were disenfranchised. That's bad. That's inefficient. That's downright dangerous for a democratic system. Having lived under both systems I know that FPTP makes it extremely difficult to get rid of entrenched political power. Under PR it's less difficult. Not easy, but not near impossible as it is now. No system is perfect, but FPTP only suits the establishment. PR has its problems, but it is far better than what we have.

It's not perfect. It's still government. And for the most part it's still a two party system. The difference is that when the two main parties start to drift away from what their supporters actually want they lose votes to smaller parties. This is a good thing. It keeps the main parties more honest. You don't end up with total idiots living in an echo chamber running things. Not for long anyway. You can argue ardern is crap. I haven't lived there in a long time so I won't comment. But she's nowhere near as crap as what we have here. And if she was, the NZ labour party would lose huge numbers of seats to 'labour party 2'. Which is how it should work. Over here the only other option is the Tory party. Right now the Tory voters are ******ed. Who do they vote for? Abject failure, or a left wing party? Under PR there would be another right wing party they could vote for. And the current Tories would never have been allowed to get into the state they are as they would have lost too many votes to ever get to this stage in the first place. Same goes for the shit starmer is serving up to the left. Right now we have 2 main parties who would only ever be fringe parties under PR. They would have their place and would pull the government of the day in a general direction. But they would never be the main party in power. Under FPTP they have devolved into utter worthlessness and are now doing actual harm to the country. And the only way to get rid of them is to vote for a party that is just as, or almost as, crap.

No it doesn't. The government became much more representative of the population after PR was implemented. It's still government. It's still got politicians who are mostly slimy weasels. But it's a hell of a lot better than it was. And it now has regular people sitting in it that aren't beholden to a specific political party for their future success. Orders of magnitude better than under FPTP. The New Zealand government works fairly well. You no longer get a government that just steamrolls through any opposition with only 30 percent of the vote. Movement tends to be slightly slower, but it takes more of the country with it. Nandor tanchos (the smoker) was never going to have any real say in the general running of the government, but he brought a counter view to any argument about drug laws that made the laws better. He was also just a regular Joe for votes on everything else, so he would likely have voted against a left wing party going too far as well as the same from the right.

Exactly. I lived in New Zealand at the time they switched from FPTP to PR. Best thing that country ever did. Led to a far more balanced group of people in parliament. Everything from conservative Christian idiots to a dreadlocked cannabis smoker who lit up in parliament to prove a point about cannabis laws. It might sound chaotic, but it's actually not. The fringe get representation and keep the majority honest. It's what the UK desperately needs. The fringe getting representation is important by the way. Hard to scream against the man keeping you down to add to your unhinged supporters if you're sitting in a seat in parliament.

I did exactly the same. Hate the Tories. Don't care about Brexit either way, but I thought it was important that a democratically taken decision be enacted. I expected the Tories to be crap. I didn't expect them to be existentially awful and utterly incompetent to boot. It's just amazing how truly terrible they are in every single way. Such a shame the opposition is so crap. There's a chance at the next election to really make a positive change for this country. But we'll get a warm turd, because what we have now makes that look inviting.

JFC. I used to have links to that area. It's still more than a couple of hundred thousand overpriced. Just madness.

Corbyn had serious issues, but at least he was finally a move in the right direction. I refuse to vote for a blairite ever again so labour is currently dead to me. If the Tories weren't so horrifically bad I suspect labour would die out under starmer. Which is what we need at this point sadly. Nothing will change until all these pricks are gone. From both parties.

You don't. You import them from the rest of the world.

And of course it's worse than that because that 300k deposit in most cases is from house price inflation on the current, smaller home. Which is now worth less. So maybe they now have 200k equity in their current home. So that 700k house could quite possibly be 465k.

What an awful press conference. I don't see how she can outlast the lettuce after that shambles. "I'm determined to do all the things I said I was going to do when running for the job, except all the things I said I wasn't going to do any more just thirty seconds ago." She's done.

He's a complete *****. And probably stupid to boot. But is he stupid enough to take the job? How am I supposed to get any work done with this soap opera running in the background?

An hour since the sacking and not even any rumours of who the next chancellor will be from what I can tell. Surely she wasn't thick enough to bin him without having someone else lined up? I'm beginning to wonder if she can find anyone to agree. Especially now she has big Tory names telling her to ****** off.

It just struck me that she might not be able to find anyone else who wants the job. She'd look pretty stupid if she has no replacement ready so maybe he will survive.

They cut him off before he could finish his sentence with "near downing Street ever again".

The funny thing is, as an ex labour voter, I'd make the same comment about labour. Our political system is completely and utterly broken. I'll just have to vote for an independent or something at the next election.

The conversation at kids drop off has been quite striking in that regard in the last few weeks. Our rent went up ten percent and we're being put on a rolling lease. Surveyor coming around next week for a 'check' so we are obviously going to be given notice shortly. Wife complained to her friends about the rent increase and was told to go to the rent board. Explained that doesn't exist any more and was met with shrugs and 'move somewhere cheaper'. This week the conversation is all about how the mortgage is about to become unaffordable and how is the government going to help them with the mortgage increase. No suggestion that a mortgage holder should just sell and move somewhere cheaper. That's only for tenants. Many of these people are massively in debt they can't ever afford to pay back, but they will be given months or even years of mortgage forbearance before they have to find somewhere cheaper. Us? 2 months.