i say swears online posted:

what's this bullshit about a hundred-member threshold for a leader endorsement? are they seriously gonna skip a member vote and install sunak

namesake posted:

They'll intend to but chances are the different factions hate each other so much that the final two will both refuse to back down and it'll be a cobbled together online members vote.

gschmidl posted:

https://twitter.com/bencsmoke/status/1583086896908902401

quote:

It was to be the unlikely duo of left-wing Chrétien and Martin who were eventually to tackle the deficit. The two of them were to dominate Canadian politics for the next decade in a story that was to strangely mirror the relationship of Blair and Brown across the Atlantic. Chrétien was a popular, charismatic Prime Minister. Martin was known equally for his supposed economic competence and his pursuit of his leader’s job. After finally achieving his goal of the leadership in 2003, he served a short and largely disastrous term in office where he became widely mocked as ‘Mr Dithers’ for his inability to make a decision.

There was of course one crucial difference between the record of Blair and Brown, and that of Chrétien and Martin. While Blair and Brown’s legacy to Britain was a record deficit, Chrétien and Martin succeeded in eliminating Canada’s.

Chrétien and Martin were fortunate in that the major political resistance they faced to their deficit reduction programme was internal. Their right-wing opposition, the Reform Party, was pushing, if anything, for them to go further.

This gave the Liberals the space to be radical. As Martin would become well known for saying, they would close the deficit ‘come hell or high water’. He was determined to avoid the ‘quicksand of compound interest’ and argued that ‘the debt and deficit are not inventions of ideology’.

Fortunately for Martin, he would succeed with what would come to be seen as a classic example of a fiscal contraction. Altogether, the Government cut federal spending by around 20 per cent between 1992 and 1997.

The central feature of the Canadian approach was a comprehensive ‘Programme Review’. Every area of Government spending was examined. For each programme, a team of ministers and civil servants examined whether the initiative was truly worth doing and, if so, whether it could be better done at a provincial level or within the private sector. If individual ministers couldn’t come forward with sensible proposals, the Prime Minister threatened to impose 10 per cent cuts for them.

The strategy was to rethink what the Government did, rather than just make short-term adjustments that would quickly be reversed in years to come. Trying simply to slow the growth of spending had been attempted before, but it had failed. Absolute cuts were now needed.

At the same time, it was important that every department shared some of the pain. As Marcel Massé, the senior civil servant who led the review, said, ‘There was blood on the floor everywhere, but at least everyone could see that others were hurting too.’ Even the health and veterans departments were to see moderate cuts.

Altogether, the Government made six to seven dollars of spending cuts to every dollar in new taxes. The Government fired 45,000 civil servants, and slashed subsidies to business, agriculture and the regions. The rates and the eligibility for unemployment insurance were reduced. Petro-Canada, a Government-owned energy company, was sold. Airports were transferred to localities and the railway CN sold. Transport spending fell by 50 per cent, while the defence budget was cut by 15 per cent.

Welfare proved to be one of the main sources of savings. Canada’s Unemployment Insurance allowed citizens to claim for up to 50 weeks after just ten weeks of work. In some seasonal industries such as fishing, some workers settled into an annual routine of two months of work, followed by ten months ‘on the pogey’. By 1999, Martin’s reforms had ensured that the total paid out in unemployment benefits was 40 per cent less in real terms than in 1990. Far fewer people could qualify.

Treasury forecasts were kept deliberately cautious, much more pessimistic than those of the private sector. The actual results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Canada ran a surplus for every year between 1997 and 2009. The result was that federal debt fell from 67 per cent to only 29 per cent of GDP.26 Despite the fiscal contraction, there was little effect on the wider economy. Between 2001 and 2007, the Canadian economy grew at the same rate as the British, at 2.6 per cent.

The real test of the economy’s durability, however, was to come with the 2007 financial crisis. Canada couldn’t avoid the impact of the crisis entirely: the main customer for its exports, after all, was the troubled US. Nevertheless, Canada rebounded faster than any other member of the G7. Part of the reason was that Canada had the room to indulge in fiscal stimulus when the economic recession arrived. Canada had, to steal a phrase, rebuilt its roof while the sun was shining. Net debt in 2008 was just 22 per cent of GDP.

Ramrod Hotshot posted:

https://twitter.com/ai_curio_bot/status/1583160841255256064

uber_stoat posted:

i fed Dall E "Liz Truss locked in combat with a head of lettuce" and uh...

Animal-Mother posted:

I am confused. She got the job, she maintained the status quo, and was quickly fired because....... ?

Animal-Mother posted:

I am confused. She got the job, she maintained the status quo, and was quickly fired because....... ?

AnimeIsTrash posted:

truss the plan

Animal-Mother posted:

I am confused. She got the job, she maintained the status quo, and was quickly fired because....... ?

Animal-Mother posted:

I am confused. She got the job, she maintained the status quo, and was quickly fired because....... ?

Marx Headroom posted:

Clyde Radcliffe posted:

Perhaps her entire time as PM has been acting out a huge humiliation fetish.

endlessmonotony posted:

She killed the queen, crashed the pound, and then got her kink on. Honestly, respect.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

https://twitter.com/tobyfrombath/status/1582721272903237633

lobster shirt posted:

theresa may ftw

SorePotato posted:

China needs to intervene militarily, a humanitarian restoration of order and democracy

SorePotato posted:

China needs to intervene militarily, a humanitarian restoration of order and democracy

bedpan posted:

a rotating PM that changes each day between liz, may, and bojo

namesake posted:

She didn't maintain the status quo. The international financial market has accepted that the UK is declining at a particular pace and so is running down its investments and so on according to that general timescale. Truss announced a new strategy of growth driven by sudden and massive cash giveaways at the cost of the remaining fragile state institutions, putting the whole thing at risk. The market traders hated it as it changed the speed of decline, the Tory party hated it because it put their nice easy ride of slow corruption at risk by revealing their overall strategy and so the movers and shakers shook her out of office.

She announced she was tearing the steel support beams out of the towerblocks main support when there was still some copper wire on the upper floors to rip out basically.

SorePotato posted:

China needs to intervene militarily, a humanitarian restoration of order and democracy

Jel Shaker posted:

we’re the home of harry potter isn’t there a hat who could choose the next PM

Hillary 2024 posted:

Meanwhile Argentina is eyeing up Las Malvinas and wondering if the UK is sufficiently distracted