🇱🇧 pickwick 🇱🇧

Self employed to face new cash flow burdens as Chancellor plans to take their tax in advance every month bit.ly/4yMr6hn so much for cutting unnecessary form filling!

I like how we have the exact same problems here as they do Im the US. Namely a collection of liberal centrists who will happily suicide bomb the left over anything that doesn’t go exactly their way.

Japan, England and Wales, and the United States make an instructive comparison for anyone who thinks prison is the answer to crime. Japan jails around 33 people per 100,000. England and Wales jails 136, about four times as many. The United States jails 541, around four times England and Wales and more than 16 times Japan. Now look at homicide, the most comparable measure between countries. Japan’s rate was 0.23 per 100,000 in 2023 (UNODC). England and Wales recorded 0.86 in the year to March 2025, its lowest since 1977 (ONS). The US rate was 5.76 (UNODC, 2023). The order is identical. The country that imprisons the most has by far the most killing, and the one that imprisons the least has the least. Cause and effect run both ways here, since high crime also fills prisons. Even so, locking up more people than almost any other country on earth hasn’t made the US safe. Guns account for much of the gap. In 2024, 76% of US homicides involved a firearm, 15,364 deaths, a gun homicide rate of 4.7 per 100,000. England and Wales banned most handguns after the Dunblane massacre and recorded 32 shooting homicides in the year to March 2025, around 6% of all homicides. Japan’s 1958 firearms law starts from the principle that no one shall possess a gun, and between 2017 and 2021 it recorded between one and four shooting deaths a year. The US gun homicide rate alone is around 20 times Japan’s rate for all homicides, and more than five times England and Wales’s. Inequality lines up the same way. On the OECD’s Gini measure of disposable income inequality, the US scores 0.394 and the UK 0.367, while Japan’s most recent OECD figure is 0.334. The link between inequality and homicide is one of the most consistent findings in cross-national research, although its causes are debated. A landmark study by World Bank economists Fajnzylber, Lederman and Loayza concluded that inequality drives up violent crime. Others, including the LSE’s Eric Neumayer, argue the link may reflect other differences between countries, and recent work suggests poverty matters even more. The research on punishment is clearer. The US government’s own National Institute of Justice, summarising criminologist Daniel Nagin, concludes that the certainty of being caught deters crime far more than the severity of punishment, and that prison can even increase reoffending. None of this makes Japan a model to copy wholesale. Its low prison numbers partly reflect prosecutors dropping most cases, and its justice system has been criticised for “hostage justice”, the use of pre-trial detention to pressure suspects into confessing. But if harsher punishment were the route to safety, the US would be the safest of the three. It is the most dangerous by a wide margin.

“Fish hook theory” is by some ways the stupidest political idea in all human history. It posits that centrists are in fact on the far-right, without realising it suggests, via basic logic, that far-right thinking is in fact the baseline centre of politics.

Landlord bellyaching can be reduced down to: "You made me do my job, I'm putting the rent up" Or when using property management intermediaries: "You made the company I pay to do my job for me do my job, I'm putting the rent up"