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Reeves On The Brink After Lying About Fiscal Gap In Order To Raise Taxes

Reeves on the brink after 'misleading' public with 'smoke and mirrors' over £20bn Budget black holeThe Chancellor has been accused of using 'smoke and mirrors' to justify tax hikes in her Autumn BudgetRachel Reeves has been accused of giving the public a misleading picture of the nation’s finances while preparing a £30 billion tax increase - to protect herself and the Prime Minister.Tensions escalated between the Chancellor and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on Friday night after the watchdog released a detailed account of its conversations with the Treasury ahead of this week’s Budget.The Chancellor had repeatedly talked down the state of the nation's finances in the build-up to her fiscal statement on Wednesday.According to the OBR, recent comments from Reeves and her team overstated the size of the fiscal gap, setting the stage for her planned tax rises and changes to welfare spending.She placed the blame on Brexit, Tory austerity and Donald Trump for a downgrade to the UK's predicted economic productivity, which would therefore make it harder to meet her own spending rules.The positions of both Ms Reeves and Richard Hughes, the OBR chairman, came under scrutiny after the Treasury criticised his decision to reveal the “private space” in which officials discuss forecasts and assess policy impacts.https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/chancellor-rachel-reeves-budget-latest-5HjdNd2_2/

Sue Hammond ● 18h4 Comments ● 9m

The IDF and Israeli Police announced that the incident is under investigation.

The Jerusalem Post, November 27, 2025:- "Israeli forces kill two wanted Palestinian terrorists after apparent surrender in West BankThe IDF and the Israeli police said that they will investigate an incident in which Israeli forces shot at two wanted Palestinian terrorists after they appeared to surrender during operations in Jenin on Thursday.Israeli Border Police stated that they identified the building in which the terrorists were hiding and initiated an hours-long attempt to convince the two men to exit the building. When the terrorists refused to exit, Israeli forces used a backhoe to partially open the building's garage door.Video footage released by a Ramallah-based Quds Network shows two Palestinian men emerging from the dark, half-opened garage entrance in front of a number of Israeli Border Police officers.The Palestinian men raised their hands and lifted their shirts to reveal that they were unarmed while kneeling on the ground before attempting to re-enter the building.The video then shows the two men being shot by officers.The soldiers involved in the incident explained that when IDF soldiers attempted to check the men to see if they presented a security threat, they acted contrary to instructions, according to Army Radio.“One of the terrorists decided to enter the building contrary to the instructions, and the other terrorist entered after him, and therefore both were shot,” the soldier was quoted as saying.However, the video appears to clearly show that the terrorists were not running or walking away, but slowly crawling. Based on the slow speed at which the terrorists were moving and the close range, it would have been easy for the soldiers to shoot them in their legs to prevent them from crawling away, and there seemed to be no basis for killing them.Moreover, the video appears to show the sides communicating, and it is possible that the crawling away was part of a miscommunication, which also did not need to result in being killed.This incident occurred as Israeli Border Police personnel were operating in the Jenin area of the northern West Bank, with Israeli Air Force combat helicopters providing support to Commando Brigade forces on the ground, on Thursday afternoon.The military noted that the Border Police activities, under the command of the Menashe Brigade, are part of ongoing West Bank counterterrorism efforts.  National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir endorsed the soldiers' actions, announcing that he extends "full support to Border Guard and IDF fighters who fired at wanted terrorists who emerged from a building in Jenin," in a statement on X/Twitter."

David Ainsworth ● 22h2 Comments ● 11h

The Party's Over

People vote Labour for several reasons. One is tribalism, as in 'My family have always been Labour'. It is difficult for such individuals to to change their allegiance as voting for another party would seem like a betrayal of their family or community. Another is self-interest. Workers in the public sector, for example, are more likely to vote Labour since this is the party committed to state rather than private enterprise. So why would they vote for any other party? But there is also a class of people, to which I suspect several of the contributors to Putney Forum belong, who vote Labour because of what they would call a social conscience. They believe that Labour is the party most likely to help the disadvantaged.  Their party allegiance is  part of who they are. Voting Conservative would be tantamount to going over to the dark side. Some individuals, of course, are motivated by all three considerations at once.What these groups have in common is that they are on the whole impervious to rational argument. When presented with evidence contrary to their beliefs they employ various strategies. One is silence. So far example, there has been comparatively little discussion on the thread  about the Budget, which has dominated the News over the past two days.  Another tactic is to blame the Conservatives for everything that has gone wrong since Labour came to power, whether it's Brexit, or Boris Johnson or  Liz Truss (though, oddly, Rishi Sunak is never mentioned, perhaps because he actually got inflation down to 2% as opposed to its current level of 4%). A third strategy is to pretend that things are going in the right direction e.g. net migration is falling (mainly due to the last government's visa restrictions), even though 36 000 unauthorised migrants have crossed the Channel this year..The elephant in the room is the enormous level of debt which costs the government over £100 billion each year to service. This burden is simply unsustainable and will eventually bankrupt the country. Unfortunately Labour's decision, under pressure from its backbenchers, to adopt a tax and spend policy will only make the problem worse. Spending money you haven't got obviously increases indebtedness while increased taxation slows growth and reduces revenues. Tax and spend, which I suspect several contributors to the Forum support, was just about possible under Gordon Brown in 2000 when the ratio of public sector debt to GDP was 29%. But now under Rachel Reeves it stands at over 95%. The party's over but unfortunately the revellers won't go home.

Steven Rose ● 2d4 Comments ● 16h

Israel - our ally

Extract from Spectator online - "Will no one acknowledge how Mossad helps Britain?"Jake Wallis Simons21 November 2025, 11:24am'Let’s imagine that an international jihadi network, with cells in London and Europe, had just been busted, with dramatic arrests in Britain, Germany and Austria. Let’s imagine that the group had been planning a string of atrocities, with a weapons cache discovered in Vienna.Let’s imagine that security services had unearthed ‘tens of thousands of Euros in cash, numerous data storage devices and mobile phones, gas pistols, firearms, ammunition, knives, and related literature’. You’d have expected such a story to make the news, right?Wrong. On Monday, the Israeli prime minister’s office announced that this precise scenario had unfolded, with Mossad handing intelligence to MI5 and European agencies that enabled them to bring the jihadis to justice and foil their murderous ambitions. The name of the gang? Here’s a clue: it coordinated with leaders in Qatar and Turkey. You guessed it.In a statement that would chill the heart of any Briton or European were they to have heard it reported, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office warned: ‘Since the October 7 massacre, the Hamas terrorist organisation has been working with renewed vigour to build infrastructure and recruit terrorist cells in Europe and other arenas, similar to the Iranian regime and its proxies.’When people talk of Iranian ‘proxies’, they are referring to groups such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and less well-known terrorist gangs in Syria and Iraq. Over the decades, Tehran built these up into a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel, which was only dismantled after the Mossad pager operation last year, followed by Israel’s airborne humiliation of the Iranian regime during those fateful 12 days in June.That is what the Israelis are saying that we are starting to face here. A network of proxies. A nascent ring of fire, preparations for a 7 October of our own, awaiting activation.'Why does our MSM not report this ?Why don't we wake up and smell the coffee (Turkish ?) and be forearmed as well as forewarned.

John Hawkes ● 7d21 Comments ● 20h