2. Corbyn won't call it unless he's sure it will succeed ("when the time is right").
3. But Corbyn insists he must be PM. Not enough MPs will back that idea for VONC to succeed.
4. So it will never get called.
5. But that means the attempt to form a GNU will also not happen.
6. So we get a no deal Brexit. Hello darkness, my old friend...
If Corbyn changes the situation in step 3 by taking a pragmatic approach, all the rest could be different too. And we could have a happy outcome.
Under the current system the LOTO has to be the one to call a VONC. Nobody is disputing LOTO's Corbyn. He is super key to VONC!
But he won't call VONC if he can't win it & he can't win it if precondition is he'll be made PM. So he won't call it at all unless he changes his tune.
- Since a GNU can only be formed after a VONC
- VONC can only be called by Corbyn
- Corbyn will only call VONC if he can win it
- Not enough MPs will back VONC if that means pledging to make Corbyn PM
then only Corbyn can unblock the situation!
Until he does, he's the problem.
(Just to be clear: any MP can call a VONC. But parliamentary convention - for what it's worth - is that *only* the LOTO's VONC *must* be debated. So in practice Boris Johnson can and almost certainly will ignore anyone else's VONC, without breaking precedent.)
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That explains why two senior Trump staffers talked about chlorinated chicken within minutes of Trump's press conference yesterday: despite what the document says, they know the deal's FAR from finalised.
They see it as a sticking point to be swept away before the Real Thing.
1. It's not finalised. According to the NYT, months of negotiations lie ahead.
2. Issue of food standards isn't dead yet, according to comments made in Trump's press conference (even though the UK side believe it is!)
1/6
3. Not clear what concessions have been made to the USA on agricultural products but their deal readout suggests a "US$250 million opportunity" for US exporters that wasn't there before.
4. British car manufacturers are better off than this morning, but not than months ago.
2/6
5. UK film industry was not part of the discussion. Starmer said this afternoon at his press conference that if tariffs are imposed in the future that would have to be discussed in the same spirit as other sectors.
6. Britain has agreed to Trump's 10% baseline tariffs.
3/6
Some more experiments with AI music generation. See what you think...
(One video per tweet. Each includes a static image with the song as soundtrack. Links to Youtube versions at end of thread, together with a rundown of the tools I used to produce them.)
Perhaps it's unworkable, but this feels like it would be a fair tax system...
1) Set the tax free allowance so that it is the same as annualised minimum wage, and raise it every year in line with inflation. Do the same for NI thresholds. So someone on exactly the minimum wage will never pay tax/NI. If it's really meant to be the "minimum" people need to live on, then let them keep all of it.
2) No clawbacks of the tax free allowance no matter your income level. Everyone gets the same untaxed band.
3) Eliminate all 100%+ tax situations. Work should always pay, regardless of the combination of salary and benefits you're receiving. Set a maximum (say 75% combined for tax + NI) and fiddle with the tax system so there are no cliff edges that create effective tax rates above that 75%. In other words, if your income from any source increases by £1, you should never gain less than 25p.
4) Tax every source of income exactly the same. EVERYTHING falls under the same regime - salary, dividends, capital gains, etc. - with no loopholes or exceptions. (If expensive tax lawyers are left twiddling their thumbs, you know the revised system is working.)
5) Adjust all the rest of the income tax and national insurance bands above the sacrosanct "no tax/no NI" lowest band to allow for 1) to 4). This will almost certainly require more tax bands and more granularity.
Net result:
- There's a sense of basic fairness across society: everyone earning at or over the annualised minimum wage (regardless of the source of the money) gets to keep at least the annualised minimum wage component of their total income.
- Work always pays, period.
- There's no point at all in trying to optimise how you make money or game the system because all sources of income are taxed exactly the same
Ok, over to you. What do you think? Be gentle, please. It may well be a naive plan, but it's a naive well-intentioned plan.
Added:
I also believe that NI should be eliminated and there should be just one combined tax.
But that's not necessary for anything I've outlined above - it just makes things simpler, especially when you're taxing ALL income from ALL sources the same - so I left it out.
Added: Minimum wage is about £20,500 for a 48-week year of 40-hour weeks.
Removing both the income tax and the NI from that would leave over £2,200 more in the employee's pocket.
As Labour are coming up to 100 days in power, it's good to ponder why their honeymoon was so short, and why they appear to be getting a torrid time from media outlets all across the political spectrum.
I've illustrated what I believe is happening. More below...
1/4
The average person's expectations of the Tories was VERY low. Yet they underperformed even that low bar.
On the other hand, people had high hopes of Labour. The gap between such stellar expectations and reality is wider than on the Tory side - even though Labour are better.
2/4
Dashed hopes can be a terrible thing. Especially after 14 years of despair. So it's hardly surprising that there has been a good deal of negative reaction and pushback.
Labour urgently need to improve their various stances to come much closer to what people expect of them.