Thanks to everyone for helpful responses to this. Learnt a lot. Seems like a lot of the debate comes down to how you interpret 13.57 to 13.60 of the EHRC's Statutory Code of Practice on the 2010 Equalities Act. equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/…
In particular how should this paragraph be interpreted? (Doesn't help that it is missing the last words of the last sentence which should be "aim").
There are no cases on different intepretations (e.g. between a transwoman who wants to use a single sex service to whom that service has been denied).
But this seems to be the criticial question as having a Gender Recognition Certificate is very rare (1-2% of all trans people) and makes no legal difference to how one would intepret access to single sex services.
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The best heuristic I can come up with for trying to imagine the reaction of a normal voter to stuff is thinking through the indirect ways they will experience a decision, as they're v unlikely to engage with the actual decision.
Like there's a load of spending review decisions that I can see are going to have an impact on cost of living - so even though most people won't be engaging with them now how much will they blame the Government for lower spending power in a few months?
The hardest things to spot are the very occassional moments in politics when lots of voters make a simultaneous negative judgement about character - Brown "bottling" the election being the obvious example.
The NHS budget increase means it will represent 44% of all public service spending in 2024/25 up from 27% in 1999-2000. The real story of austerity is not a reduction in the size of the state but the NHS (and pensions) sucking up all the cash.
Covid will hopefully be a one off but the demographic and healthcare trends driving this aren't going away. At some point it stops being sustainable without some radical thinking or technological change.
Another way of expressing the issue. In cash terms grants to local authorities have fallen by 30% since 2010 and *before covid* the NHS budget had increase by 20% since 2010.
An army of 42 people is a shit army. That's not even going to be able to invade Andorra.
Nice example of a common maths confusion. £9M (combined salary of said army) is 0.025% of £36bn. But people find it intuitively hard to conceptualize the different between a million and a billion.
The classic example is a million seconds is 11.5 days and a billion seconds is just under 32 years.
Pedantically entertained that they started the graph in 1950 otherwise it would have shown taxes were higher a few years after the war and that the headline was wrong.
But also the Telegraph should be pleased it's like the War again when Britain was great; men were men etc etc...
Of the course the "death knell of Conservatism" line is absolute nonsense. The only consistent principle of Conservatism (not conservatism) is to retain power or get it back. From the Second Reform Act to tariffs to tax rises. Whatever it takes.
1) No issues with tax increases but it's the wrong taxes. Should be done through taxing wealth and higher incomes. Should hit me a lot more than this levy does and low paid workers a lot less.
2) Creating a new tax - a third tax on income - seems batshit when we already have two that could be used (if you want to use that method). God knows how many un-thought-through problems will emerge over the next few days.
3) Most of this money goes to the NHS and though the claim is that more of it will go to social care as costs increase after 2025 that will not happen in practice. NHS budget will not be cut. So really this pushes the problem of paying for social care into the next Parliament.
The most annoying thing about the NI row is the reinforcement of the idea that you can "pay" for long term recurring spending with a specific unhypothecated tax increase or spending cut. There's just one big pot of cash.
Maybe some new variant of covid leads to £10bn extra costs next year. Or a military involvement or cost of debt repayment increases more than expected. What "pays" for that?! Doesn't make any sense.
The real Qs are how much do we need to spend on social care vs other priorities. And what is the best way to raise the overall amount of money we need. Imaginary hypothecation is just fantasy politics to make people see a connection that isn't there.