The tax burden on workers is greater than at any time over the past 40 years and is likely to rise to a record level within three years, according to a free-market think tank.
The Adam Smith Institute says “tax freedom” day falls on Thursday, six days later than last year and 20 days later than before the pandemic. It has not been this late in the year since 1985 when the Thatcher government was attempting to rectify the disastrous public finances after the economic crises of the 1970s.
Tax freedom day is a symbolic indication of how long into the year the average person would have to work to pay their annual tax bill, with all money earned thereafter going to themselves.
The think tank says that under government tax and spending plans, tax freedom day in 2028 will not arrive until June 24, which would be its latest date. That would make the tax burden higher than it was during the Second World War or the Napoleonic Wars.
Well, there isn’t an excuse, is there? We’re not fighting off the Germans nor the French. We’re just suffering from the fiscal incontinence of the babykissers that get elected.
Bring Back The Tyburn Tree!
The big thing is pensions. Then health. Probably shouldn’t have discouraged people from smoking fags.
The thing that bothers me most is how much the wanky parts of the state have increased. A common point people make is how public services are crumbling, and there’s some truth in that. But we are also spending a huge amount of money on it. Because we aren’t paying for lots of people to fix potholes, and mow the lawns in the park with a small management overhead to it. The management overhead nowadays is absolutely massive. And we do lots and lots of luxury, non-important things like £900m of spending archaeology of HS2. We have this weird combination of things which is like doing your laundry by hand because the washing machine’s broke but you’re drinking Lagavulin 16.
The problem is the moronic electorate who believe that if only the “rich” and Amazon were fleeced more, everyone could swill champagne whilst the washing was done by someone else.
We the tax payers are funding a political industry in this country. The clever part is how hidden it is. Imagine each department is a bowel of spaggetti with ragu. Mixed in are chopped up fried cockroaches. The fried cockroaches represents the political industry. That is the part we want to get rid of. However, because of the way it has been chopped up and mixed with the parts we do want (spaggetti and ragu), politicians think it is too much effort and simply leave it be.
The electorate isn’t moronic, and anyway, everyone wants something for nothing, and wads of other people’s money. Look at Dale Vince.
The problem is that they have been taught to think that “the economy” is notiong to do with them but instead is all about money and interests rates and so on, all under the control of Treasury pointy-heads and people in banks. No-one has ever told them that “the economy” is simply people trading their productivity for the goods and services they want.
There is, therefore, a reason why TPTB keep the populace so uniformed.
It’s tempting to see the NHS as part of the overall stupidity and a method of pissing money up the wall while trying to look as though they’re doing a good thing. It’s like putting a £15.000 Chrysler V8 in your 1965 Ford Anglia and thinking ‘ve got a supercar, giving doctors a 20% pay rise then bunging the organisation £20,000,000,000 that just happens to be lying around to “bring down the waiting lists”. No method or mechanism even mentioned in passing, just the assumption that the money is like Growmore, just sprinkle some around and watch the good stuff appear…
I’ve worked out that Tax Freedom Day this year will be 30th December, though may be later next year.
Penseivat
Norman,
“The electorate isn’t moronic, and anyway, everyone wants something for nothing, and wads of other people’s money. Look at Dale Vince.”
The electorate pay almost no attention to government. They concern themselves with who went where during the transfer window or who is being a bitch to who in the Kardashians.
There’s about 10-15% of people who notice a glitch in The Matrix and don’t let go of it. Who go and figure out why the glitch happens. You point out the problems with green energy, the hard fucking data from official bodies about it, and very few people care. Lots of people will reply with something utterly spastic like “well, I think not polluting the planet would be a good thing”. I have almost begged people to discourage their kids from doing a wanky degree. I have explained how there’s no money in photography. “well, I think going to university is a good thing” they reply, like fucking sheep. Then 4 years later, they’re complaining about it.
And this isn’t about class or education or background. There are lots of middle class graduates like this, but my mate who used to repair trains notices these things.
It’s why I just stopped caring about doing anything to help political parties. Most of the public don’t think much about it. They only care about the colossal debt of lockdown when the bill comes, rather than at the time. Campaigning for the Libertarians was to end lockdown was my epiphany in this. When people said they opposed it and I said “and you’re OK with the public debt that’s rising because of it” and I realised that these people hadn’t even thought about something that is hardly rocket science about government giving people money for nothing. You might as well be talking to a load of dogs.
Can’t find anything earlier than c1970s in the UK, when Tax Freedom Day was around 23rd April.
In the USA, in 1910, Tax Freedom day was January 19th.
Most people don’t pay attention to government or how things work because they don’t understand how things work.
A lot of people can’t tell you how cars work, nevermind do actual work on them. I tell people I have a lift on my truck. Some people just glaze over, not a clue. Some, who knows cars a bit, ask how high. The usual question after that even from people who like cars is “how much did it cost to put in?”. Very few even consider that I might actually have done it myself. Same with changing the glow plugs. Very rare now to find people who do their own maintenance on vehicles to any extent beyond maybe checking oil levels.
Heck I’ve actually had conversation in the past that went:
Me – “do you have a petrol or diesel?”
Them – “what do you mean?”
Me – “when you go to the fuel station, what do you put in?”
Them – “the green handle one.”
And that’s just cars. Lots of people can’t do basic home maintenance. Nevermind understanding something as complex as the economy or socio-political matters. It’s why simple sound bites work. They have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand. Instead they believe that the government/civil service knows best and will work in their interests (lol)
@Chernyy Drakon
Imagine the fun to be had by painting the handles of the fuel pumps at a busy petrol station.
So, to summarise many of the comments, the electorate are morons:
They are brainwashed into thinking that the economy is what the Treasury/BoE looks after.
TV and Z list celebs are panem et circenses for them.
Even considering the impact or second order effects is far too difficult.
Forgive me if I think these people (who are likely the 85%-90% of the electorate) are getting what they deserve.
“And that’s just cars. Lots of people can’t do basic home maintenance. Nevermind understanding something as complex as the economy or socio-political matters. It’s why simple sound bites work. They have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand. ”
I’ve said for many years that life for most people nowadays is a black box system. They have no idea why things work, or how to fix them. If they stop working they bin them and buy another one. I think the same attitude even goes for personal relationships – many people are clueless as to how their own behaviour is viewed from outside and have so little self awareness that they are amazed when people react negatively to them. And have no inclination to change their behaviour either. Ego rules.
I still understand how lots of stuff works, but increasingly in a sort of handwaving way. But fixing it? Most kit these days is essentially unfixable even with acquired skills.
Sometimes I have to engage brain though. The oil boiler failed last December, so I got the maintenance firm out. They swapped bits, to no avail & started talking about a replacement boiler. I even got them to quote. Then I thought, fuck this (it was bloody cold!) & got the multimeter out. Eventually I reckoned it was the oil valve solenoid on the side of the pump, even though the maintenance guy had swapped it when testing. Powering it up off the boiler and watching the ammeter drop to zero when it warmed up confirmed it. Plumb Center had one in stock so that sorted that.
There is no way I could now do the same on the car though if one of its multitude of sensors failed. Even with an ODB-II reader the manufacturer error codes are secret & uninformative.
But we are at war with Russia.
It’s not going very well. What happened to all the guys confidently predicting Ukrainian/NATO victory against the miserable Ruzzians?
Mothers in Britain will soon have to make an inconceivable choice – send their sons to fight against Russian soldiers in Europe, or suffer the end of Nato, Ukraine’s former foreign minister has said.
Dmytro Kuleba issued the warning only a few hours after Kyiv faced what he described as ‘the worst drone assault’ since the start of the invasion.
He spoke to Metro exclusively about Vladimir Putin’s goal to ‘expose’ the ‘falsehood’ of the collective security commitment that binds members of the military alliance, and Europe’s ‘weaknesses’.
He said: ‘Many people believe that the real test for Nato is whether the US is going to fight for Europe.
‘The real test will be whether British mothers will actually accept that their sons have to die for Finland or Estonia or Poland. If they don’t, there is no Nato.
Who wants to tell him?
Also, blaming the electorate is retarded
The electorate just spent 14 years voting for:
* “Austerity”
* Net immigration in the “tens of thousands”
* An end to the “green crap”
What did the Con Party do with that historic mandate?
There are people in our country who want infinity immigration, Net Zero and ruinous taxes. They are not the general public.
@Tractor Gent
an obd2 scanner is almost a requirement for diagnostic of sensors.
Though I have a Ford so can easily see in much more detail than what an Obd2 reader shows anyway, as well as making changes to the settings. I do have one, but haven’t used it in years.
And I’m increasingly finding that so-called experts aren’t that good either. Always ask them a few tricky questions before engaging their services to see how knowledgeable they are.
“Then I thought, fuck this (it was bloody cold!) & got the multimeter out. ”
And there you go. You have a multimeter, and know how to use it. That puts you ahead of 75% of the population straight away. All the women and at least 50% of men, probably considerably more. You don’t necessarily need to be able to fix X yourself, just to know enough to know the basics of how it works and where its not working, and where to point the expert at. And know enough not to be BS’d by the ‘expert’ who isn’t.
The number of times the guys who use my cricket ground have messaged me and said ‘The mower won’t go’. Thats it. No assessment of how its not working, what happened when it stopped working, what the operator was doing, what noise it was making (if any), what bits still work. Just ‘It won’t go’. Morons the lot of them. Actually thats not fair, they just haven’t ever been taught this stuff. But they are moronic for not asking questions. I never mind lack of knowledge, what I can’t abide is the blank refusal to bother trying to acquire any.
@Steve
Suffer the end of NATO?
I don’t think the general realises the other viewpoint
Why suffer?
We can be nicely neutral without having to follow the Americans around like puppy dogs.
CD – Kubela is a Ukrainian politician, he’s not a general. He’s also only 44 years old, so well within the age range at which less well connected Ukrainian men are kidnapped off the streets, given an AK-74 and an hour’s “training”, and sent to die or become amputees in a trench.
But Mr Kubela has more important things to do than die for his country, such as getting you to die for his country: In December 2024, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School has announced the appointment of Dmytro Kuleba as a non-resident senior fellow.
When Eastern Europeans say “NATO” they are thinking of a big magic red button they can press, and Americans and Brits will fight their wars for them. They have a similarly transactional view of the EU. The EU thinks Slavic proles are desperate for “EU values”, when they see it as a free money club and means of more easily moving to Western Europe. It’s why, long before the current unpleasantness, I asked why we were handing out nuclear war guarantees to countries like North Macedonia.
What are North Macedonia going to do for us in return? Surely the point of allies is we want valuable allies, not people who are always begging for cigarettes. North Korea is a valuable ally to Russia because they have a working military industrial complex, we ally with people who can’t guarantee the lights will stay on this winter (Germany).
Agent S @ 10.30, the late great George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKN1Q5SjbeI
Chernyy,
“A lot of people can’t tell you how cars work, nevermind do actual work on them.”
I don’t have to know much about cars. Just enough to tell a good mechanic from a bad one.
If you’re selecting governments, you should know things like spending comes from taxes, supply and demand, jobs are a cost, tariffs are paid by the consumer, the minimum wage is always zero and the principle of the Laffer Curve. This is like the economic equivalent of knowing about matter existing in 3 states, or the main types of average, or the basic ways to cook food, that homeopathy is bollocks, what photosynthesis is, and that the world is round. I’m not saying people have to reach Tyler Cowen’s level, any more than being Andrew Wiles or Gordon Ramsay. But right now, the level of understanding of the basics is like being 15th century retards.
@ Steve
The electorate just spent 14 years voting for:… What did the Con Party do with that historic mandate?
The fuckwit electorate voted for Labour because they were sick of the Tory party. That’s like chopping off your hand because you had a cut on your finger.
The problem isn’t “pensions”. The problem is an unfunded state pension set up as a Ponzi scheme that requires current subscribers to subscribe enough to pay current claimants, with ever increasingly more claimants than subscribers. *Proper* pensions aren’t the problem, schemes where you actually put money into them in order to have funds to take out. But then, governments and avaricious basterds – but I repeat myself – see that pile of money and want to steal it.
AS – The fuckwit electorate voted for Labour because they were sick of the Tory party. That’s like chopping off your hand because you had a cut on your finger.
They “voted” for them by default, because we have (had) a two party system and Reform hadn’t yet demonstrated it can win seats. The Tories did everything within their power to throw the election to Labour, which is why Jumpshit Sunak was doing a gay little Indian dance of glee when he was voted out in a landslide.
(Again, where are the people who defended this grinning little turd when I told you he was shit? Still worried about “racism”?)
Rilly, blaming the British electorate is like blaming the children of Joseph Fritzl or the victims of grooming gangs. We’re not the nonces, they are.
Go ahead and call me ignorant and naïve, but part of the reason for that is that I’ve spent all my life as a freelancer and haven’t had shrewd colleagues to teach me stuff.
From when I first became aware of it I’ve known it as the State Pension, paid from National Insurance contributions. My dad had a corporate pension paid from contributions deducted at source from his salary. I couldn’t see a difference and no-one told me any better. So I’ve lived my life until relatively recently having assumed that the state will actually pay me a pension, not some grace-and-favour benefit if it feels like it.
I betcha the majority of people have the same misapprehension as I did, conveniently fostered by the choice of terminology. And as with state/private healthcare, that majority of people would have expected it to be their entitlement that they’ve paid for with their taxes, not just some grace-and-favour etc. that can suddenly be withheld from them according to political expediency They were relying on this and many are now committed, having little alternative and being too old to generate one. Don’t criticise everyone for having been conned by carefully misleading terminology.
And of course the problem isn’t money. What’s a pension pot? Money. The problem is of the demographic shift in the last 50 years from 5 people supporting (i.e. generating the goods and services for) each pensioner to 3, soon to become 2.
Money can’t solve that shortfall. Neither can importing Somali arse-wipers. Only incredible productivity gains in the private sector, automation, or Boomer die-off can do it. And then GenX die-off, and Millennial die-off, because they’re not raising the next generations of workers.
‘What happened to all the guys confidently predicting Ukrainian/NATO victory against the miserable Ruzzians?’
Steve
Must admit I expected the Russians to overrun Ukraine in nothing flat. They are evidently a lot more incompetent than I realised.
As for the Ukies, I still feel their error was to get rid of their nukes. Though I’d have to admit that the US, after pushing the Budapest agreement, was then stupid to get involved in cheering them on.
@ Steve
Rilly, blaming the British electorate is like blaming the children of Joseph Fritzl or the victims of grooming gangs.
If you willingly asked a bunch of low-IQ & ethics Pakistani men to drug and abuse you then you’d have got what you deserved. Note I’m in no way suggesting that happened, just following Steve direction of debate.
That’s what the British electorate have done – they voted for lying chancers and then got arse raped by them. The politicians didn’t stage a takeover the country, they were let in by voters who thought that unicorns fart magic money rainbows to pay for everything.
Steve,
“Also, blaming the electorate is retarded
The electorate just spent 14 years voting for:
* “Austerity”
* Net immigration in the “tens of thousands”
* An end to the “green crap”
What did the Con Party do with that historic mandate?”
But the Conservatives were clearly wrong uns after Cameron was made leader, back in 2005. You can see the signals everywhere.
– Cameron calling himself heir to Blair
– Cameron and Osborne NOT ONCE criticising Gordon Brown piling on the spending after they took over leadership (until the banking crash, when they changed teams).
– Cameron criticising WH Smith for selling chocolate
– Boris Johnson loving the Olympics going to London rather than trying to cancel it or to run it as cheaply as possible.
– Theresa May talking about the Conservatives being “the nasty party”
– Cameron calling UKIP racists, loonies and fruitcakes, which is a far greater insult than they gave to any party on the left.
And if you hadn’t sussed them out in 2010, in the first term… abandoning the Lansley plans to privatise health, delivering fuck all in terms of EU reform.
It was the WH Smith thing that did it for me. Just a small thing, but clearly he wasn’t even close to some laissez-faire, small government politician. If you think you can dictate what snacks a shop sells, what else do you think is the job of government rather than individual choice?
I only voted for Boris in 2015 because we had to get Brexit over the line, so pragmatic. Boris is also a statist cunt, who banned drinking on London Transport, supported the Olympics and pushed the button on HS2.
Cummings has gone off on one:
https://archive.ph/VCjag
Some very good stuff in there even though he’s still a lockdown fascist, AI dreamer, and never once mentions the demographic time-bomb or immigration.
@Norman June 12, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Don’t feel bad about being lied to about your state pension. It happens everywhere. If the government told the truth about it, they would be hanging from lampposts.
It is amazing the number of people here in the US think that Social Security has a nice little pot of their money waiting for them at retirement. FDR set it up as a welfare program from the beginning, only he couldn’t sell it to the public as that. Hence the lies.
Even on conservative web sites, every time an article comes out about reforming the system, commenters scream that you dare not touch their money. They should know better. They get downright pissy if you try to tell them otherwise.
Norman,
I like Dominic Cummings, but he suffers from thinking that government can be improved. You just bring in lots of smart people.
I think the blindspot is because he’s someone who does care. Like he got free schools done. He led the Leave campaign. I’ve met some people in government like this. They bring about a lot of improvement. The problem is that this is only driven by the personal wishes of those people. That they want government to run better. This is great. But it isn’t incentivised. No-one gets an evening of whores and cocaine for delivering a project early. No-one gets yelled at if its late, or fired if it’s very late. So a lot of people just stay in jobs, sucking at them until they leave with a nice pension.
The only answer to fix the current way the government works is to shrink it down to the basic fundamentals – defence of the realm and upholding of contracts.
And then keep it doing only that.
Everything else can be done at a local level so that if you vote for some extra benefits you don’t steal the cash from others outside your area.
Of course, this is what the USA started out as but was corrupted by federal government giving themselves power to regulate interstate commerce. Once the money taps were turned on, it was pork for everyone.
Bboy – Must admit I expected the Russians to overrun Ukraine in nothing flat. They are evidently a lot more incompetent than I realised.
Me too, and the Pentagon. Partly that assumption was incorrect because they didn’t do what any Western country would have done – shock and awe, going in heavy, looking to break the unlucky country in the shortest amount of time because you never know what the next election will do. They went in light with the idea of a quick regime change war, which almost worked until we forbade Ukraine to talk peace.
Partly it’s because, as we’ve found, large scale maneuver warfare quickly gets bogged down into attrition when the place is full of landmines, drones and modern ISR.
As for the Ukies, I still feel their error was to get rid of their nukes. Though I’d have to admit that the US, after pushing the Budapest agreement, was then stupid to get involved in cheering them on.
Ukraine having nukes would be a disaster for the human race. It’s a good thing they don’t have any, Ukrainian politicians are not responsible people and can’t be trusted with weapons of mass destruction. We’d be better off just giving the whole of Ukraine back to Russia than consider allowing them to have nuclear weapons. There’s nothing in Ukraine worth dying in an atomic fire over.
AS – That’s what the British electorate have done – they voted for lying chancers and then got arse raped by them. The politicians didn’t stage a takeover the country, they were let in by voters who thought that unicorns fart magic money rainbows to pay for everything
Um, yes they did stage a takeover. It was the entire purpose of the Rishi coup.
The Conservative Party couped their own prime minister in a desperate rearguard effort to prevent the British government from doing anything conservative. To blame the voters for this is pointless.
WB – And if you hadn’t sussed them out in 2010, in the first term… abandoning the Lansley plans to privatise health, delivering fuck all in terms of EU reform.
I think we both agree, but you know, I know, and Dancing Rishi knows that there’s a lot of ruin in a nation and in a political party’s “brand”.
Whenever the British people have had the opportunity to do so over the last couple of decades, they’ve chosen the “conservative” option promising Brexit, “responsible” economic management and much lower immigration.
Labour “won” a landslide due to a tiny increase in their vote percentage because the Tories successfully disgusted millions of voters into not turning out. Rishi was dancing on the day hundreds of Tory MPs lost their jobs, because the Con Party hoped to pass the baton back to Labour, thinking they could go back to pretending to want to do conservative things and get the mug voters back in future.
Well, he’s not dancing now. The Tories are dead, and the new opposition party is Reform. The British public catches on slow, but they do catch on.
Jesus Steve, if it’s not the electorate to blame, who exactly is going to ride in to save them from the nasty politicians?
Norman: National Insurance was set up when most people died 5 weeks after they retired. The Insurance bit was to keep the lucky buggers who lasted a bit longer. Now people generally live decades after they retire so the State Pension is unsustainable as we all know.
I guess Ernie Bevin couldn’t have seen that at the time and probably still had nightmares about The Workhouse keeping him up at night. However it should have been obvious to the Tories when they got back in that that couldn’t carry on as an unfunded future commitment, but they did nothing, and here we are.
AS – Jesus Steve, if it’s not the electorate to blame, who exactly is going to ride in to save them from the nasty politicians?
???
It must be me, failing to communicate.
I’ll try again: it’s not worth getting angry at Mrs Duffy for still having some residual trust in British institutions that took a few election cycles to dissipate. We are the bloody electorate, self-flagellation doesn’t help us.
The fault lies with the organ grinders. It’s ridiculous to expect the average voter to be clued in to the inner workings of politics, most people are only now beginning to understand that the telly is lying to them all the fucking time.
@ Tractor Gent
National Insurance was set up *more than a century* after Friendly Socities set up Widows’ Pensions and Old Age Pensions for retired workers *belonging to those Friendly Societies*. Asquith set up national old age pensions, starting at 70 around 1910.
Attlee’s National Insurance Fund was a Ponzi Scheme from the start – Nye Bevan said (approximately) “The great thing about the National Insurance Fund is that there is no fund”. Attlee’s team hoped that they were dumping a load of manure on Churchill when he next won an election, but the economic growth under Churchill/Eden/MacMillan (and later Thatcher/Major) delayed it hitting the fan for two generations.
And the generation that’s really going to get it in the neck is the Boomers, because it’s so big. By and large the Silents got away with a golden retirement. ‘Course, public sector Boomers have such vast pensions that they can piss them away supporting XR and migrant charidees.
But Musk is right. With indigenous birth rates everywhere except Africa being below replacement GenX, Millennials and GenZ will also be too big for the younger generations to support, and importing uneducated tribal Africans won’t fix this.
@ Steve
It must be me, failing to communicate. – I have no idea what the point of defending ignorant people is?
The first step in tackling a problem is to identify the root cause. Then you fix the underlying problem (identified in step 1) which then handily removes the need to address the symptoms.
The root cause of the problems we have are the fucktard electorate who believed that they could have everything that a politician promised them without any hardship or great cost to themselves.
And this illusion was kept going with a combination of rapid economic growth, then plastering over the cracks with borrowing once the drag of the dead hand of government regulation began to take hold.
We now need the electorate to understand the deception that was perpetrated upon them and vote out all the wankers who are responsible. Bonus points available for making the consequences of the failure of politicians so severe that others won’t try the same thing in the foreseeable future (lions, sharks, etc ).
After that, the country has a chance of recovery. But to suppose the electorate are some passive actor with little or no blame is to mis-identify the root cause and thus fart about trying to deal with the symptoms.
Steve,
The reason I think Putin hasn’t won is that this isn’t being fought as a full on Russia vs Ukraine war. It’s more like a pet project, a folly for Putin and he’s being indulged by the people under him. If it went full war, lots of conscripted dead kids going back to St Petersburg, the people under him might do something about him with piano wire. But a limited thing with a load of poor people from Asia, often not even Russians, who cares?
Other than taking Sevastopol, I don’t really see a lot of benefits for Russia. It isn’t worth a load of genocide for a bit of agricultural land, even good land in Ukraine.
@ Norman
“Boomers” is an American term, inappropriate to discussions of the Ponzi scheme in the UK called “National Insurance”. The Bulge Bracket lasted from 1945 to 1949. We, Bulge Bracket, have already suffered from lower job opportunities and less promotion than the previous much smaller cohort born in the War Years 1939-45 (and the also smaller, but not so much smaller, cohort born during the high-unemployment 1930s). Almost all the Bulge Bracket have now retired (I admitted it in my mid-/late-seventies) and most of us have occupational pensions *that we have earned*.
BUT a lot of my contemporaries have occupational pensions that are fixed in money terms because before the Wilson/Healey hyperinflation we all assumed that money pretty much retained its value – and most employers could not afford to pay vast sums to insure against inflation damaging pension schemes (BP, Shell and HMG were the exceptions that I can remember). The price of a Mars Bar has gone up by a factor of 66 so anyone who thought that his contribution for one year to the works pension scheme in 1960 or 1970 would buy him two
Mars Bars a day for life is utterly screwed – it’s one Mars Bar in alternate months.
It’s not the rich who are screwed by inflation as they tend to hold their wealth in non-monetary assets, it’s the decent working class who save up for a rainy day or their old age in Halifax or their local building society and find out when it rains that the government has stolen 90% of their savings/
I wonder if the reason that humans appear doomed over the next century is that we’re all descended from women who believed what charismatic men told them. “Of course I love you”, “the cheque’s in the post” etc bullshine. And the welfare state means that women indifferent to whether they’re being told the truth know that they’ll be looked after.
So heritability of personality traits and all that, the offspring today want to believe that government knows best and candidates can be trusted, because it’s in our nature to do that first and then be disappointed later.
Cynical childless atheists don’t come into this argument for obvious reasons.
But there’s stats that fertility in the 30+ age range is an all time high. So humanity will be saved but only after all the bullshit susceptibility phenotype has died out or been killed in the 22nd century identity wars.
@Tractor Gent: the state pension had nothing to do with Ernie Bevin: Lloyd George introduced it before the First War.
You really mustn’t believe Labour propaganda that claims they invented the Welfare State in 1945. That’s complete bollocks.
AS –The root cause of the problems we have are the fucktard electorate who believed that they could have everything that a politician promised them without any hardship or great cost to themselves.
If you moderate your expectations of Mr and Mrs Average Voter, you won’t be so disappointed. In a normal society, normal people don’t pay that much attention to politics beyond what they’re forced to pay attention to by the media.
It’s like expecting people to read the T’s and C’s when they’re updating software. People used to have a general assumption that our politics were relatively honest, that the game isn’t rigged. It’s been a painful learning experience over the last 25 years as people have discovered all our institutions are horribly corrupt and captured by strange ideologies that are opposed to British life.
It’s such a huge thing, psychologically, to wrap your head around the fact that the government is trying to abolish your nation and your race, it’s not surprising only weirdos noticed this long before the majority started to suspect.
WB – The reason I think Putin hasn’t won is that this isn’t being fought as a full on Russia vs Ukraine war. It’s more like a pet project, a folly for Putin and he’s being indulged by the people under him. If it went full war, lots of conscripted dead kids going back to St Petersburg, the people under him might do something about him with piano wire. But a limited thing with a load of poor people from Asia, often not even Russians, who cares?
They have done a lot to try to avoid casualties people will miss. Wagner emptied out Russian prisons, the Chechens are willing to fight in exchange for jihadiwagons, a lot of the Russians fighting aren’t ethnic Russians, they’re Asian or Islamic minorities in the Russian federation.
Other than taking Sevastopol, I don’t really see a lot of benefits for Russia. It isn’t worth a load of genocide for a bit of agricultural land, even good land in Ukraine.
It was never about land, or else they’d have begun the war with a much larger force. But as you say, the land isn’t worth the cost (not just in lives, wrecking the place is very expensive for the “winner” who has to reconstruct). I think *now* they’re going for maximum expansion goals because it’s obvious to them that neither Ukraine or its European backers are serious about peace yet.
So, Russia will press on to places like Odessa, hoping they can either grind the UAF into dissipation, or cause the loss aversion of their foes to kick in and bring them to a settlement.
But strategically, Sebastopol is all that matters in Ukraine. Putin didn’t want the Donbass (but wouldn’t accept the pro-Russian separatists being crushed in Donbass) and it took many years of provocation to get the Russkies to go in openly. If Russia was hungry for land, they could have scooped up these provinces in 2014.