Happy Friday!
I know it’s the last week of the summer holidays (well in England and Wales, Scotland went back in August and I think N. Ireland went back this week) and so the news cycle is slower that it would be but I just can’t escape the feeling that the lunatics can’t even be arsed to run the asylum. We do still technically have a Prime Minister but he’s spent most of the summer on holiday and this week seems to be doing a ‘dress up’ tour of the country. The sheer arrogance of the useless waste of space, he’s been a terrible Prime Minister, and we are in the middle of a cost of living crisis and he’s doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.
However, the smart money says that Liz Truss is going to be the next PM. Being asked to choose between Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss is like being asked if you’d like to drink the sewage water or cook with it, neither option is good but Sunak is probably the lesser of two evils. However, I’ve been pretty vocal about my opinion that the Tory Party won’t ever vote for a brown man (doesn’t matter how rich he is) over a white woman who seems to worship at the altar of Margaret Thatcher.
Anyway, she won’t agree to an interview with Nick Robinson, doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what she could do about the cost of living crisis except, have a fight with the EU over N. Ireland and cut taxes. Look, no one likes paying taxes but tax cuts always work better at scale, the more money you have, the more tax cuts benefit you. The tax burden in this country already falls the heaviest on the people who earn less. If you wanted to cut taxes, for the bottom, you could but you’d need to raise taxes on corporations, the highest earners i.e. raise the top rate of tax (you could have a supertax year like MacMillan did in 1961 – I mention this because he was a Tory), or tax capital gains tax, so that people who have passive wealth pay more. The problem with all of those options are that Tory Party donors don’t like that.
So this winter is going to be horrible, this is probably the first time in my life that being single and childless is to my advantage. I’m just so aware how bad things are for people that were doing ok 18 months ago (yes even as COVID and lockdowns were happening!) and it’s going to get worse.
Here are this week’s links….
How Britain’s coming recession will work: A simple guide for Liz Truss. The Daily Mash is supposed to be satire but this reads like a prediction.
Trump Can’t Hide From the Mar-a-Lago Photo.
Why Is Dr. Oz So Bad at Social?
Which foods can I cook now and store for winter? I’ve been talking about preservation this week, the comments are full of ideas.
‘All of a sudden it’s undrinkable’: why an entire US city has no clean water
Nic Dempsey 