Member Info for skier1

Nope.

Italy hasn't grown since it joined the Euro (at too high a rate) in 1999. Greece went bankrupt due to reckless German debt in 2015. The no.2 economy and no.1 military (UK) left entirely the EU in 2016. Germany has been in recession since 2022. France is proposing 90% tax rates and hardcore communism and is on the verge of bankruptcy (like Greece) in 2024. US GDP per head in 2025 is set to hit $90,000, versus just $63,000 in the EU, a staggering 30-45% difference.

Thr dripfeed of EU decline is clear.

Stay well clear of the EU. Its best days are long gone.

Find it bizarre how a few folks are always so keen to rejoin the EU! The bloc is a mess. Germany has been in recession for 2 years and is deindustrializing at a terrifying rate, as the Chinese manufacturers eat their lunch. France is on the brink of bankruptcy and in the grip of left and right extremists. Italy hasn't grown its economy since the last century. The Baltics are desperately preparing for an invasion from Russia across the Suwalki Gap. Almost everything that can go wrong, is going wrong. The bloc is slowly crumbling, like a slow-motion car crash. A complete mystery why anyone wants to rejoin that chaos and decline.

Some have been posting that for 1+ years. It's been clear for ages that the DCA car-loan scandal bill is going to be way (way) higher than most expect. Tens of billions of £££. Not billions. There is no way a hardcore Marxist state is going to pass up a chance to rinse the capitalist banks! They will milk it until the pips squeak.

Very sad news. British brands and British industry are collapsing. Vauxhall closing in Luton after 120 years and one of the world's oldest vehicle factories. Smithfield Market in East London closing after nearly 1000 years and the world's oldest meat market. Typhoo Tea has gone pop after 120 years and one of the world's oldest tea and beverage brands. Steel mills shutting. Oil and gas firms closing.

Belfast shipyards going bankrupt. Wave after wave of British brands are now crashing and disappearing. England, Wales, Scotland, NI, everywhere, nowhere is immune. The era of great British brands is drawing to a close. A trickle of failure has become a flood. With a Labour recession on the cards for 2025, this is only going to get worse.

Think the DCA car-loan scandal, and a possible bank windfall tax to fund Labour's red utopia, are going to weigh on LLOY until at least early 2026. There are months of uncertainty ahead. Nobody knows the size of the compensation or windfall, and just how big or painful they might be.

UK has the longest and most-wasteful tax system in the entire industrialised world.

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1861822597576437936

UK = 17k pages of tax code

US = 7k

Australia = 5k

Canada = 3k

Germany = 2k

France = 2k

Spain = 1k

Italy = 1k

Netherlands =

"...Just eat delisting from the LSE"...

Negative business news is turning from a trickle (under the Tories) to a flood (under Labour). Every few hours brings another bad headline, from rising unemployment to Ford to Vauxhall to Just Eat. The UK is on the brink of recession.

Ford now popping its head above the parapet and saying EV net-zero mania has all but finished off the UK car industry. Simply put, UK consumers do NOT want electric cars. Too expensive, too long to refuel, too little range.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14132847/Britain-car-industry-crisis-lack-demand-electric-cars-Ford-boss.html

The UK is just a tiny 3% of X users worldwide, and about 0.1% of Musk's total global revenue and asset base. Doubt Musk is losing much sleep over a bit of virtue-signalling and tantrums in North Wales 👍

Err, the UK Premier League (football) is the world's no.1 global sport and broadcasts to a huge 195 countries daily across the globe. As big as Hollywood. Not to mention the UK's Harry Potter, the world's bestselling book across the entire planet this century. And BBC World, the world's no.1 TV news channel. And BBC World, the globe's no.1 biggest radio network. And London, recently voted independently as the world's no.1 tourist city. And the English language, spoken in every single country on planet Earth -- the Latin of the modern age...

Those 184 countries in the GE petition know exactly where the UK is 😉

The signing of the UK GE petition by citizens in a whopping 184 countries shows just how concerned the entire world is with Labour and Starmer. They can see the loss of liberty, the 1984 creep, the horrific tax regime. The world fears for Britain and her future.

Labour is gaslighting us all. They must be wetting themselves in private.

We won't raise worker taxes... worker taxes are going up. We won't stop pensioner heating cash... we're stopping pensioner heating cash. We won't tax farmers... we're taxing farmers.

Growth is (and never was) their goal.

Their unspoken goal is to rollout communist ideology as early and as fast as humanly possible. Enrich the red unions, bloat the state power, imprison political dissenters, snatch farmland from the bourgeoisie, all the classic signs of the old USSR are there.

Labour is gaslighting us all 👍

Several posted on here months ago that the final DCA car-loan scandal cost for the UK bank industry will probably be somewhere in the range of £10-30b, perhaps more. PPI cost £40-55b. There is no way Labour is turning down a chance to rinse the capitalist exploiters of the West. They will go wild for it.

Labour just announced they are cutting the number of Royal Navy ships by -8% in 2025.

UK tax is soaring out of control, state debt is spiking hard, inflation is rising again, unemployment is creeping up, Nissan warns of the end of the UK car industry, Jaguar is pausing a factory for a year (perhaps forever), Jaguar is stopping selling cars in the UK for a year, and now Ford is cutting huge numbers of industrial jobs for working people.

It's all got the whiff of Labour 1970s 👍

Labour is the true "nasty party". How many OAPs have passed away in this freezing week of snow and ice.

As Richard Littlejohn points out, the US gets world-famous billionaires and Masters of the Universe at its Treasury department for national finance... UK gets Rachel from the complaints department at the Halifax...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14097163/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Trumps-putting-Masters-University-charge-tax-cuts-stuck-Hon-Member-Fantasy-Island.html?ico=authors_pagination_desktop

It was telling that Rayner swerved the PM question on whether the farmer death tax (IHT) will go up in future. She didn't say no. That means (in politician speak) that IHT will go higher. Today 20% IHT tax for farms, tomorrow 40%, maybe 50% the day after. The Marxist class war is real.

labour and the bank of england are taxing and talking the uk down into recession.

bailey at the boe just yesterday was doom-mongering about the economy and ****ging off the uk on the international stage.

ftse 100 looking ready next week to sink below the 8000 level.

Gunsup,

The UK state is wildly out of control. Tax at a record high, state productivity at a record low, it's sucking the lifeblood out the economy. We're shifting wealth from the productive private sector to the un-productive public sector. It is beyond stupid.

It's important not to swallow the far-left hysterical propaganda on "privatisation" of public services. Britain has the no.1 cleanest drinking water on all of planet Earth. The energy market chaos is entirely caused by Ofgem, a *public* body, who recklessly dictate supply and retail prices -- see the quarterly Sovietesque "price cap" for an example. Ditto for rail -- Network Rail, a *public* body, controls the track and stations, has a staggering £65b of debt (losses), meaning the UK rail network was only fractionally privatised -- most of it has always been run by the state. And let's not even get onto the NHS, another failed state-run enterprise (like British Leyland) -- some 7 million people are waiting up to 2 years for treatment, making it just about the worst healthcare "service" in the whole industrialised world. Privatisation in the UK never really happened -- it is semi-privatisation (at best).

Nope. You don't have a leg to stand on. The UK state is now 40% of all UK GDP. Nearly half of everything. UK state (public) productivity per-head today is fully -40% lower than the private sector. If a worker in a private company builds 10 spreadsheets a day, his public-sector peer will only make 6. Average output per state employee is unchanged since 1996. After three decades of smartphones, email and Internet, some of the biggest productivity-enhancing tools mankind has ever seen, the UK state has grown output per-employee by (literally) 0%. Nothing. Zip. Nada. The UK productivity gap is *entirely* caused by state mismanagement, indiscipline, and chaos.