thetindrum.bsky.social
#Books, #cats, #food, #gardening. Almost any meal can be improved by the addition of capers or hot sauce.
181 posts
37 followers
80 following
Getting Started
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Ooh ok !
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Oh I hadn’t realised it was a poll, I thought it was submissions for ideas and I was going to ask for ‘something gratuitously Norway’ …
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Just had the same experience at the Courtauld. Feels excessive.
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So handsome!
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Chairman Meow and I are very happy together 😂
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More like New Cross and Brockley than the good people of Blackheath, surely
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This is not the point but … I would LOVE that assignment.
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Writing a Substack
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Erm, and Bromley. Which just wants to live its best life in Kent.
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Useful, thanks v much for your response!
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Thank you for this thread. I’m interested in how this compares to breast screening diagnoses of early (? Not sure that is the right description) cancer. I recall there was some reporting a while ago that sounded similar …
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Billy Corgan and Darcy Wretzky
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It’s algorithmic trading
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It’s not breaking though.
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This isn’t breaking. It’s just a week-ahead preview. Calm down.
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I don’t understand why so many books are published. Surely not all of them find an audience. So why do publishers spend money publishing them?
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Coming after the epic mistake that was quantitative easing, this suggests a fundamental rethink of monetary policy is needed. None of this gets enough attention. Would be great to spend less time talking about migration & more time talking about the tradeoffs involved in central banks’ decisions.
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… so if inflation goes up in the coming months, are central banks going to make the same mistake again? Pushing up households’ costs (largely rent and mortgages which are tied to the base rate) just as the cost of everyday goods also rises sharply?
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I liked Worldle today
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I enjoyed Worldle today.
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Extract 18/18
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(Until two guys start a podcast about it. Then that will be the most centrist dad thing that has ever happened)
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Removing the right to citizenship from refugees is disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
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And let me decide how much milk to put in!
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YES!!! Bloody coffee drinkers. Takes ages.
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I would say yes because they are for two different things. Obvs if you’re selling a house under probate then you’d pay both (tho only the rich pay inheritance tax).
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Yes, path dependency is a problem. Would need some kind of transitional arrangement for sure.
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And, when you think about the sheer amount of additional capital that many households have garnered from rising house prices through absolutely no efforts of their own, it’s possibly the most morally justified tax ever invented.
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Exactly. I also wonder if it’s feasible to link it to the uplift in value since previous purchase. Shouldn’t be too technically difficult given Land Reg data but I’m not a conveyancer …
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Switching stamp duty from the buyer to the seller seems, by contrast, like an unalloyed good thing. Would love to hear the arguments against.
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Totally agree and I have been wondering what I was missing on this one, seems pretty obviously a bad idea. Glad it’s not just me!
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“Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, said there would now be “six or seven months of speculation about what taxes might or might not be increased in the autumn”. “There is a cost, both economic and political, to that uncertainty,” he said.”
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
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What’s most annoying is, they’ll have to drop/fudge them in the end anyway. And they’ll take months to come round to it while the lobby turns it into a confected internecine row that takes up weeks of public attention. & then it will be too late for the spending to kick in before the next election.
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Let’s see what’s at stake: domestically, a once-in-a-generation mandate to enact sweeping change in a country desperately in need of it. On the world stage, a defining geopolitical moment. Opposition parties are irrelevant for the next four years. There will never be a better opportunity than this.
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The immigration story is Reform’s. The public spending story is George Osborne’s.
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(The tax pledges will eventually be dropped, btw. They have to be. But they’ll probably take months to do it, it will monopolise political news coverage for weeks in a damaging way, and by the time it’s done the spending it will free up won’t arrive in time for the next election anyway)
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Hello Ann. That’s not a very polite response. I’ve addressed some of those policies in my thread. Of your list, the rental market measures are probably the ones I feel most positive about. Is it enough to compensate for the failures in other areas? No. More fundamentally, what is the story here?
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You can’t blame them for choosing to stick with the (increasingly stupid) tax pledges when the geopolitical situation provides the perfect opportunity for ditching them. You can’t blame them for the (predictable) economic consequences of increasing employer NICs.
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… you can’t blame the comms team for taking the citizenship route away from refugees. You can’t blame them for the forthcoming cuts to benefits. You can’t blame them for letting the world beating university sector sink at precisely the moment that it could seize a generational opportunity.
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I started out thinking that the fundamental problem was communications: they were doing good stuff, they just weren’t communicating it well (and letting giftgate rumble on into and beyond Tory conference week was a lot worse than just ‘not communicating well’, it was an absolute disaster). But …
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If it wasn’t already obvious that Labour lacked its own story during the election, it became VERY obvious in the first few months after the election. Again, contrast with 90s Labour and their first weeks in office. It was extremely clear that 2025 flavour were woefully unprepared for office.
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Once you’ve got a narrative, your policy programme becomes quite obvious. The problem with lacking your own explanation of the world is that you start with the problems & the policies are shaped by the existing narrative about the problems. Which isn’t your narrative. Because you haven’t got one.