
Originally Posted by
Eric Cartman
I think their comms has centred around trying to be adult in the room and that prevents them from getting into the trenches and actually calling out hypocrisy and providing strong justification for policy. They seem to want to be everyone's friend.
For instance the wfa debate, in my mind not the wrong policy but because of their approach it has been a grenade, they said 'we had to do it to fill X gap in funding, difficult choices etc.', rather than 'it is poorly targeted welfare'. This would have rescued them down the line when the increase in pension credit claimants was brought up to pick apart the 'removing wfa saves x billion', it just feels a bit amateurish. Another one is when the supermarkets en masse called out the government for hurting farmers, which, whether it's delusional or deliberate deception, is massively hypocritical given their history of squeezing every penny out of farmers, not a peep from the adults in the room because they don't want to upset anybody.
In terms of policy, tax system is becoming more and more regressive every year that it puts more focus on income than wealth. Social care needs massive reform. I'd love to see some sort of push towards British people gaining/retaining collective ownership of British assets. I say an article the other day about the ownership of major airports across Europe, mostly having some public ownership, Heathrow is owned by random countries and companies across the world. We seem to find ourselves in a situation where we provide capital investment or guarantees in things to encourage private investment and it ends up being a gift or bung basically. Some way of encouraging growth past a certain point in successful startups, it feels like everyone has read entrepreneur 101 and has their exit entirely setup before they have even started. It means every time we build something useful, it gets sold to Google the week after the founders reach their retirement number. No idea how you do that though.
There's probably loads more.