FishFace

That’s great, but 18% out of poverty is not fixing an entire country. If labour had such results, Reform supporters would still be blaming the remaining 72% on immigrants.

So, you could do that on income or on wealth.

On income, the “rich fucks” could be defined as the top 1% of individuals with an income over £160k. Call the average income of someone in that bracket 200k, and tax them every penny they earn - that’s about £68 billion, which is net 40 billion once you subtract the tax they already pay. This is not a marginal rate of 100%, this is leaving them with no income. £40b is a decent but not massive amount, equivalent to 3% of the current budget.

That maximum shrinks from 40b to something like 20b once you decide on a marginal rate instead, and probably to something like 10b once behavioural change from those high earners trying to pay less tax.

So wealth then. The commonly touted version (I believe that’s 1% on everything anyone owns over £10m) is projected to earn 24bn a year, but then rapidly be avoided by people stashing their money elsewhere. A one off wealth tax might work much better, and would work well from the point of view of “wealth inequality has increased massively, we need a once in a generation rebalancing” but this would raise 160bn once only.

If we can optimistically raise £44bn per year for a while, that works out at £1500 per household, or £30 a week. That is not nothing - many households are desperate for that much. But that is not an amount that just fixes poverty for the entire country. It is not an amount that pays for every school with RAAC to be renovated, or every GP surgery to have enough appointments, or every town to have a bus service that isn’t shit.

This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The country does not tax the rich enough, and fixing that will help equality. But it will not turn the country around. It will also have knock on effects that make its practical efficacy even less.

If it were easy, some country would have managed it, or at least most of it.

Not sure what Musk’s has to do with it unless you think that labour has some way of seizing his assets, nor what Trump has to do with it unless you think he’s running for labour leader.

It would, because competent labour leadership wouldn’t be able to magic up the growth they need to not have to have a shit choice at each budget. The best leadership in the world can’t undo years of underinvestment and a massive spike in inflation, but had to pretend they could to get into power.

Oh easy peasy! Just solve all of societies problems!

Sarcasm aside, that’s really hard, and it’s not like we don’t have examples of other countries trying other strategies than what we’re trying.

It’s not easy to fix the media either, but it’s a smaller area to focus on than all of our problems…

The practical effect of the supreme court ruling has indeed been horrible in cases, but I would lay the blame mostly with the media, and perhaps with the Court for failing to provide sufficient clarity to the media. The actual ruling is so much narrower than the conversation immediately afterwards, with the BBC asking unqualified people if they thought it meant that women’s bathrooms were now only for biological women, when there was simply no need to ask this question - the ruling is clear that it doesn’t say this.

This reporting then feeds the situations you’re talking about. Now, should Starmer have spoken out about this? I can see the argument for doing so, but not from the popularity point of view. The basis on which he could reasonably speak out would be narrow and legalistic, and risks treading on the authority of the Court. It wouldn’t be the resounding pro-trans rally I imagine you might want, because that just plays into the hands of those trying to turn trans rights into a wedge issue.

Online Safety Act

I’ll just point out that, tragically, this is another one of those things which is stupid but popular.

I don’t think it’s surprising that Labour is being judged this way, but what I started this off by saying was that I don’t think they’ll really improve with a new leader. Two things are clearly true:

1. Starmer & the government made mistakes
2. Starmer & the government are phenomenally unpopular

But seeing them together and thinking, “we can have a more popular (and successful) government by changing the leader, and this is clearly true because of this combination” - which is the logic I saw - is wrong.

Maybe Starmer was the wrong pick for leader and we’re seeing this now, and having a different one would have been better. But at this point it’s too late unless there is clear evidence that Starmer himself is a massive problem, which their isn’t. There’s all these other explanations for his personal unpopularity that would apply to any other leader too. So replacing him might get rid of his propensity for mistakes, might get in someone a bit more left-wing than centrist, but it must be recognised that “a few fewer mistakes and a bit less centrist” is not a good reason to swap leader, given how bad that is in other ways. It’s his unpopularity that is propping up this narrative.

I haven’t seen those polls. It just doesn’t seem plausible to me that all these Reform voters - most of whom haven’t yet voted for Reform, what with their popularity being low at the last election are so beguiled by Farage that they don’t believe any Labour proposal on reducing immigration. Those that are so beguiled… presumably believed Farage’s praise of the proposals.

Remember what has driven the increase in Reform’s popularity - it’s high levels of overall migration, conspicuity of small boat crossings, and conspicuity of asylum hotels. These things have all got worse, and Reform’s popularity rose on the back of it. We’re not talking about dyed-in-the-wool cult followers here, but people who believe (wrongly in my view) that immigration is a massive deal.

To back this up with real data, this Ipsos poll has 2024 Labour voters saying 64% to 4% (yes, four percent) that immigration is too high versus too low. (23% “about right”, rest “don’t know”). That’s 64% of people who voted Labour at the last election primed to like this announcement and clearly not so enamoured of Farage that they don’t trust Labour to implement it. Yeah, some of them may have been holding their noses to vote Labour for other reasons, but nose-holders exist in all camps, so I think this is strong reason to believe that the policy is likely overall to be very popular.

I would love a genuine answer to this question with a proper analysis of costs, subsidies and profit margins, but this article ain’t it. I would guess - but don’t know - that the difference is mainly because the fixed infrastructure of a rail network consists of far more stuff that needs to be built, paid for and maintained than does an airline.

Also the emissions figure (“double”) is way off - a domestic flight is something like 250g of CO2(e) per kilometre (per passenger) whereas a train is about 35g. Source.

gutting trans peoples’ rights

Are you referring to the supreme court case? It wasn’t Starmer, and it didn’t gut trans rights; it said that it was legal to designate a space for biological women. Maybe there’s something I forgot about though. I don’t think this is making him unpopular though, as Starmer’s views on the issue are pretty mainstream.

pandering to reform bigots

Is very popular and cannot be an explanation for his unpopularity.

ID cards

A sensible policy but yes, everyone knows it’s unpopular so this was an unforced error

Authoritarian bullying of pro-Palestinian activists and protestors

Palestine Action should never have been banned. But Yvette Cooper did that, and let me remind you of the past home secretaries, PMs and governments who gradually made the law on protest more and more repressive, who oversaw much worse anti-immigration pandering, who said more definitive things about trans issues, and so on and so on.

I’m not saying that Starmer would be some wonder-kid in other circumstances, I’m saying that his unpopularity is absurd and utterly disconnected from his actual performance.

Yeah we have a combined COVID and Ukraine inflation bomb after 14 years of underinvestment…

I mean look at Starmer’s missteps compared to the missteps of all the Tory PMs. Somehow Starmer is less popular than all of them. I think it’s therefore safe to say that his unpopularity is not mostly due to things he’s doing wrong, because in spite of it all, he’s still doing better than any recent Tory leader.

No, that’s why the Labour Left don’t like him, which is a pretty small segment of the population. His unpopularity is unprecedented and reaches swathes of people who never heard what he pledged during the leadership election, don’t care about “trans” and want fewer refugees.

You’re right he’s done little about the cost of living. But no-one would have; the only way to fix it is to “grow the economy” (as the mantra goes but which the government has little control over anyway) and wait for wages to catch up, which was always going to take years.

Services are crumbling because of 14 years of the Tories slashing investment into them due to a slavish adherence to austerity ideology at a time when balancing the books didn’t bring us any benefits. Now when interest rates are high and borrowing expensive, we are fucked. Labour can’t go back in time and un-fuck us, and they can’t run an increased deficit without spiralling interest payments. What are they supposed to do? People talk about a wealth tax - in its most common form raising about 25 billion. An extra 25 billion would be great, but it would not fix the cost of living crisis, and it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reversing underinvestment and it is not possible to implement immediately (you’d need to set up a lot of apparatus to assess and collect the tax) so they’d still be woefully unpopular next year when everything is still shit and the wealth tax has never yet been collected.

That leaves them with broad-base taxes like income tax and VAT. Putting them up will genuinely help their finances and public services now but… is phenomenally unpopular.

I said ever since they came to power that they were screwed before they started. They’ve contributed to it with needless mistakes and U-turns they’ve pretended weren’t, but none of that is more than a skin of mould over the turd of a situation we’re in anyway. To round it off, the right-wing press won’t print any of their successes (and there have been a few) and screams about everything that they can’t fix.

Getting a new leader will probably not fix anything though. Starmer’s incredibly unpopularity isn’t because it’s Starmer, it’s because he’s the Prime Minister and, worse than that, the Labour Prime Minister.

I recently saw my favourite band (over 1M monthly streams) and bought tickets days after they went on sale. I just waited weeks to book tickets to a band with 400k monthly listeners.

So I’m sure it’s not just Taylor swift, but it is the biggest acts, and the ones who sell at under market prices.

None of this affects my actual point, which is that there is a cost to government intervention, and the cost of inaction is that people have to listen to recorded music, or see a different musician, to get their music fix, which is not a big deal. If I’d not been able to get tickets to those concerts, what would I have done? I dunno, something else.

Buying a CD or streaming is not “the same” but it is still participating in culture. As is “going to a cheaper concert by a less popular artist” which you didn’t mention. As are all the million other cultural outlets that are much cheaper or free: a museum visit, seeing a film, watching an amateur theatre company perform, heck, watching TV or going to a pub quiz is participating in culture - you obviously mean something very specific but unless you can explain why it is uniquely served by these big-name events like instant sell-out concerts and sports games there is just no reason to prioritise them. In general no two cultural experiences are “the same” but that doesn’t mean the government needs to step in to enable every single kind. Watching TV is not “the same” as watching The Proms in the Royal Box - no doubt an amazing cultural experience - but we’re not saying the government needs to enable that, are we? So we all understand that it’s not important to enable everyone to participate in any bit of culture that they might want to.

In a nutshell: how is it more - not just different - “participating in culture” to see Taylor Swift than to see Heriot (random band I picked off AllMusic… not the same genre) at a local venue? Why is it important enough that the government gets involved with keeping prices down, when it doesn’t do the same for million more important things?

My point is not the best seat but a seat.

So for you, the government should step in to regulate the price of concert tickets for basic seats, but not for the best seats. How many regular seats should be sold at below market value at each venue? All of them? What about when the venue upgrades 90% of their seats to “premium” seats and takes those out of the lottery sale and sells those for market value - is that OK? Are you satisfied if just two seats per performance are lotteried? Per tour?

These are all political decisions now. Some civil servant is being paid to make them as a full-time job, and everyone’s taxes are paying for it. Why is that a good use of public money? Shouldn’t we instead put that money towards paying a civil servant in the department of health, or the foreign office, or justice? Or towards paying a nurse or police officer? All so that the correct number of people can experience Taylor Swift in a concert instead of on spotify, and watch a football match in a stadium instead of at the pub?

but then explain why you would.

I think I’ve been clear that there is no line in entertainment where the government should be involved in price regulation. What line do you think I have drawn?

The U.S. is a great example of why. It is cheaper to get 2 tickets to Ireland plus concert tickets and board then to see the same group in L.A., CA. There are every few regulations stopping ticketmaster from scalping the ticket on stubhub, a ticketmaster subsidiary.

How is that different from Ticketmaster selling the ticket for a higher price in the first place?

You didn’t reply properly. I explained the alternatives which all seem reasonable to me, which you didn’t respond to at all, and I asked you a question which you didn’t answer. I’ll answer, and explain again, but if you reply in the same dismissive way without answering properly, you’re not worth trying to hold a discussion with.

you think it’s good that bots can automatically buy every single ticket, only to resell it at extortionate prices?

I don’t think it matters. It’s like asking if I think it’s good that diamonds are expensive due to supply-side uncompetitiveness; if you can’t afford it, you can just not buy it. Nobody needs a diamond. There’s no communist utopia where we’re handing out diamonds or Taylor Swift tickets to all citizens, right? There’s a limited number of tickets, and the people running the show can decide whether to hand them out by selling them for what people are willing to pay, by lottery, or by the current hybrid system: well below market value, but with a lottery to decide who gets to pay the suppressed price.

If the sellers’ lottery system is not working, or if they’re pretending it’s a lottery system when in fact all the tickets go to “resellers”, then that’s their problem. It’s not causing societal harm; the same number of people get to see Taylor Swift either way, and getting to see her isn’t important enough for the government to step in and say that Taytay tickets must be delivered by lottery system.

It was never about the bots; you’d be complaining if the sellers sold at market value as well; so it’s really about prices.

The government getting involved in enforcing prices is risky business and can introduce very bad unintended consequences. If nothing else, it’s just something that the government then has to do, which costs money. So it should be done in situations where the consequences of not doing so are clearly bad. The consequences of the prices of the following getting really high are really bad for society:

• Food
• Water
• Sanitation
• Healthcare
• Heating
• Electricity
• Transport
• Internet

Where does tickets to the biggest music superstars come on this list? Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy down. It is not worth spending taxes on making sure that Taylor Swift’s ticket delivery lottery remains a true lottery.

Live Nation’s annual profit is under a billion dollars, on a revenue of about 23 billion, which is a profit margin of about 4%. I agree they should have to play by some rules, and having an effective monopoly on ticket sales risks abuse of that monopoly, but it is not currently happening to any great degree, and it has nothing to do with the high cost of tickets. Also their business practices in general, with predatory pricing, should be legal, but again, this has nothing to do with whether, in principle, there needs to be government intervention to enforce artificially cheap ticket prices.

“Making sure there is an unattainable area” is a weird way of putting. It’s fine that some experiences (whether to do with art and entertainment or other things) that are out of reach of almost everyone - there always will be. Almost no-one can have the experience of sitting in the best box in the best opera house. Almost no-one can experience going to space. Does the government need to regulate prices of those experiences?

You ask “where is the line” as if you are not drawing one. But you are, you just don’t even see it; there are still experiences you think should receive free market prices, you just haven’t thought much about them. I’m not drawing a line - I’m saying the government should keep out of enforcing prices in entertainment and can’t think of a scenario where it would be necessary.

And I’m saying you can just choose not to buy the tickets at that price. That’s the free market in action.

There are lots of cases where the free market is clearly inappropriate. For example, I can’t just choose not to have basic utilities like water and heating, so there needs to be an appropriately regulated market to prevent price gouging. But if prices get gouged on tickets for Taylor Swift or whatever, then who cares? So only rich people can go to her concert - big deal, people who can’t afford it can:

• go to a cheaper concert by a less popular artist
• buy her album for much less
• stream her album for even less

What are the consequences if we had this model?