Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
But what I do not like from the current lot is the implication that London somehow doesn't deserve to be levelled up too. Has it had a lot of money spent on it, yes. So let's spend more money on other areas too, it doesn't have to be us and them and I utterly despise as a Londoner (adopted!), being put against the North. We are all one country and one people.
TfL is insanely cheap for the good service it does and the amount of revenue London generates, means it needs good public transport. Does that mean the North should not have it, no. But destroying TfL as the Tories are trying, is not a solution. It's odd how when Johnson was in London and running a massive TfL deficit, there were no concerns about money then, what changed?
Spent Christmas at my daughter's , they had all taken tests etc , she felt crap next day and just received the wonderful news that she has Covid. Wife is having kittens.
😟 Hope things work out okay Malc.
Been at my brothers for Christmas back at barn conversion now. Just catching up on things. There a lot of it about. I’m sort of feeling guilty I’ve never had it. 😕 unless one of the bad colds I’ve had was it.
Yesterday I got soaked, freezing, lost all my money. I was on the right horses for the finish, they slipped over in wet before got there. 🙄 Brilliant day out though! 👍🏻
Getting a bad chest now. Done latty test negative, but still possible to get bad chest without covid suppose having spent day out getting so wet and cold.
Thanks, best of luck. I had not a bad day yesterday , got a trixie up and had a few pounds on Bravesmansgame. Got an early winner today on Nichol's novice hurdler Iceo, looks like it will be a good one. Have done Highland Hunter in Welsh National.
I am having a bit of a fallow day today after my over excited largess yesterday, though I know it’s all on and it’s tempting, I havn’t looked at it. I’m going to catch up on Emmerdale and just chill out.
Bravemansgame a good call 👍🏻 I don’t know what happened in the KG6, it was fun to watch, and why I don’t back much on chase or big races the favourites came nowhere. The ground was more soft than people thought I think. The winner was worthy at twenty something to one.
Hope things go well Malc. I’ll post some thoughts on New Year’s Day runners for sure.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
Gove is a marmite character, but he is a spectacularly productive and innovative cabinet minister. The contrast with Robert Jenrick, his predecessor (and a man once regarded as a rising star) is huge. Jenrick seemed to be just treading water, following orders from the treasury and No.10 and incapable of spotting the political catastrophes that would inevitably follow. Gove is quickly coming up with ideas of his own, some of them quite good.
Gove is an out and out arse of the greatest proportions. A total waste of space.
Has it ever been shown this works? And I wonder how safe it is pumping such massive volumes of chemicals around like that?
Local officials under extreme pressure to control the outbreak. What could be a more visible sign that they are doing everything they can then to bathe the whole city in disinfectant?
Apparently this is Delta too, and not yet Omicron.
At what point does this sort of thing begin to approach “drinking bleach” levels? (In “category” terms, if not overall effect?
I don't know much about the local government officials in Xian, but I think that with a boss like Xi, this is understandable in terms of panic and the desire to be seen to be doing something, whereas Trump's musing about drinking bleach was more obviously incoherent rambling stupidity.
Yes, as scary as it was to who hear the President of the USA say something like that, we live in a society where this sort of thing can be called out for what it is.
I will continue to stand up for London, even as the Tories continue to trample on it. I am extremely proud of London and I am proud to live there.
And that's what the Tories don't get about Khan, he is standing up for London I love, open, tolerant, decent and accepting of the world. I would not want to live in the kind of London the Tories currently imagine.
Anyway, that's enough for me on the London topic for today
I also am quite open in admitting my own issues with anger and I am sure this is not nice to read, I am trying my best to be more pleasant, hope people will understand this
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
I think the difference between me and the Corbynite clan - even when I was in with them - is that I am not ashamed of New Labour. And I never will be. I find it very disappointing and saddening when they attack the last Labour PM that actually got elected, what must the public think
Not sure why any poster would particularly be worried about doxing issues with the name - well let's call it PT. I went to school with a PT,I work with a PT. They're two different people, it's an incredibly common name.
Well back in the day we had an issue with this. Tim Bot full name was revealed (it was a similar common name), then Plato based on all the things he had talked about on PB went totally overboard (because Tim had been targeting her for months), searched the internet for more info and found out and published his home address and family details.
Remembering #DesmondTutu: “I would not worship a God who is homophobic… I have to tell you, I cannot keep quiet when people are penalised for something about which they can do nothing… I oppose such injustice with the same passion that I opposed apartheid.”
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
The issue is that London has massive wealth and relative poverty cheek by jowl. Douglas Adams once wrote something about one street in North London having bands of vast riches and poverty as you walked down it. Public transport is generally brilliant, meaning that someone wanting to raise themselves out of poverty can find the means to do so nearby. Hence all the East London barrowboys who started working in the city.
Some of the northern, Welsh, Scottish and rural towns are very different, with large areas of relative poverty, and very poor transport links, even inside the town, yet alone to other towns. These towns face many problems London will never have.
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
The issue is that London has massive wealth and relative poverty cheek by jowl. Douglas Adams once wrote something about one street in North London having bands of vast riches and poverty as you walked down it. Public transport is generally brilliant, meaning that someone wanting to raise themselves out of poverty can find the means to do so nearby. Hence all the East London barrowboys who started working in the city.
Some of the northern, Welsh, Scottish and rural towns are very different, with large areas of relative poverty, and very poor transport links, even inside the town, yet alone to other towns. These towns face many problems London will never have.
Sure - but the solution is to level up those places, something I am very much in favour of?
The problem I have is that the Tory approach at present is to attack and destroy London and then just do nothing for the North instead (cutting HS2 etc)
I really don't want to pull the site down any further so am quite happy to apologise to @BartholomewRoberts if it means we can put this issue to bed
I don't get what you need to apologise for. Having the same avatar, saying "yes I have changed name" and still saying the same 0.01% sociopathic stuff is hardly starting again with a clean new image.
If anyone doxxed him, it was himself.
I don’t get it either. I cannot see what @CorrectHorseBattery has done that is wrong.
The parties have kissed and made up. Do we really need anyone else getting involved?
I never saw it and was replying to Rochdale. Take your own advise and f*ck off.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
Gove is a marmite character, but he is a spectacularly productive and innovative cabinet minister. The contrast with Robert Jenrick, his predecessor (and a man once regarded as a rising star) is huge. Jenrick seemed to be just treading water, following orders from the treasury and No.10 and incapable of spotting the political catastrophes that would inevitably follow. Gove is quickly coming up with ideas of his own, some of them quite good.
And some (like this one) make as much sense as Boris's bridge to Belfast.
I don't agree. I can tell you from the bitter experience of Dundee that there are few things as depressing as a town centre that is boarded up and deserted. We need to save our town centres, both because of the employment they bring and the community they create.
We need to do a variety of things to achieve this. Firstly, and probably most importantly, we need to rebalance the playing field between the online and bricks and mortar retailer. At the moment this is heavily weighed in favour of the online supplier who pays a fraction of the business rates that the B&M retailer does because, historically, town centre shops have been seen as cash cows ready to be milked. We also need to improve transport into town, parking, the availability of charging points, a broader range of permitted uses for old retail and to increase the number of people actually living there. It is not a sufficient policy but it is a start. And it is going to be absolutely central to the levelling up agenda.
The biggest problem is the pyramid that has been built on the back of town centre shops. Quite simply town centre shops are not worth *that* much money any more.
I had this conversation with an Abingdon town councillor, years ago. He literally could not accept that the river of money was gone.
This effects the landlords, the tenants, the councils and the government.
There are a few choices -
1) Recognise that due to the enormous pressures on hosing costs caused by planning limits, that turning town centres into more homes is infinitely more profitable than keeping the shops*. 2) Accept a massive reduction in taxation, rents etc to match the actual footfall/spend. This includes a lot of landlords going bust. 3) Increase the cost of other ways to shop by about 100%
*Where I live, the council insisted in retail units on the ground floor of new developments. Which, in some cases are now still empty after a *decade*.
That's a massive problem, because for the last couple of decades new shopping centres has been the go-to way to regenerate towns. Romford, to take an extreme example, has at least one more complex than it can really support- so there are vacant sites, some fairly meh shops and big distances to walk between shops.
Romford is especially unlucky- it's been hit by both Lakeside and Stratford. But even without the online effect (who needs classic department stores any more?), there's more shop space than is useful. But it will be hard to shrink in a coherent way.
We have to have rezoning in our town centres - changing shops back into houses. One thing I always say: many (albeit not all) shops in towns are actually not in bad buildings, that could be made into homes once more by rebuilding the ground floor. You can then either have them as flats (many shops have flats above anyway), or as full family houses.
It's a better solution than having boarded-up shops that slowly degenerate.
So the question becomes: what do we want from our town centres?
Already happening here in my small town - helped by the fact that the old shops were shops + houses anyway. A number of shops on the fringe of the centre have become all houses over the last decade or two with the shop window infilled or even retained. Mind, they are in an area which used to be the main transit route to the local factory, which no longer exists.
I don't know about the planning rules in Scotland, but in England the government have already effectively rezoned town centres as housing by allowing a permitted change from all employment uses to residential. That came in within the last year or so. So the only shops that won't be changed back to housing are those that are uneconomic for conversion or are prime retail. It is all a bit more complex than that, but this is the jist. There is always a time lag of a few years before these changes actually happen on the ground, but they inevitably will.
Given this background, any campaign to 'save shops' and abolish business rates makes no sense because shops are already wiped out by the drive for low cost slum housing of the type that many shop conversions provide, given that they basically look out on main roads where passers by can stare in to your front living room. Who wants to live there? No one by choice, just people who have no other option. This is all, incidentally, a way for the government to deliver new housing without having to make strategic decisions about which parts of the countryside get built on.
At the same time the government publish national palnning policy that tries to support the vitality of town centres and the shops in them, and also seeks to achieve beauty and a high standard of design in housing development. Nothing the government does in this policy area makes any sense at all, it is totally insane and irrational. Perhaps Gove will get his head around it, but the probability of him doing anything useful is ultimately low, because that would involve undoing a decades worth of bad policy and law initiated by the conservative party.
Interesting. In the case of my small town the conversions - which would, I think, need planning permission - are on the fringes in streets which were in any case partly residential - so it just means that the shops peter out a little closer to the core centre. There's been some conversion of shops into things like solicitors' and vets' operations as well and the big Co-op department store (small by city standards) became flats on the upper levels. And one derelict villa converted to shop did get demolished for flats. But on the whole the main shopping area has remained, albeit with a few empty shops and some charity operations. No sense (yet) of what you describe; in fact a derelict area on the main street was redeveloped with relatively high quality council housing.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
I agree and disagree. When your kids are in a school literally held upright by an endoskeleton fitted to hold up ceilings, when you are working flat out for £2.20 and hour and are in grinding poverty, when you are in pain with a chronic condition where there's an 18-month waiting list to even see a specialist, you don't dismiss that New Labour shopping list.
But it needed to kick on having levelled up the worst of the effects of the Tory era and largely failed to do so.
On Scotland, I just want the Tories to lose seats. If that means an SNP clean sweep, that's fine by me.
This logic is fine for an English person.
Compare and contrast with the kool-aid overdose that is @Farooq
What the fuck are you on about?
I think he's a tiny bit upset that his staunch support for the Conservatives in the NE looks as if it might be undermined by your positing the possibility of voting for the SNP in order to exclude the Tory chap.
Edit: he does sometimes refer to 'SNP koolaid' and such things.
Boris will not announce any new restrictions for England today.
Fun times Boris is back and will allow vaccinated people in England to pub and club at New Year's eve to their hearts content. Unlike the Welsh and Scots where Sturgeon and Drakeford have shut nightclubs and made restaurants and bars table service only
5....4....3....2....1.....Now on BBC News / Sky News, we are joined by .... member of SAGE, who is speaking in a personal capacity....this is highly irresponsible behaviour by the PM, the evidence is clear, we need to lockdown....
No, only leftwing statists like you now want lockdowns post vaccination.
Boris knows who his coalition is and is correctly not going to risk leakage to RefUK by imposing another lockdown. Freedom Boris wins as he did in 2019, authoritarian Boris won't.
Boris like Trump now against further restrictions. Starmer Labour even more than Biden for more restrictions
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
Can you elaborate what you mean by contempt?
Well, I might mention MPs like the late Stuart Bell, who was happy to always appear on TV, but rarely, if ever, held surgeries in his constituency. He preferred to spend his time in London or France rather than Middlesborough. Or (dare I say it) the Beast of Bolsover, whose thinking about what his constituency required did not evolve over the decades.
It's not just Labour: one of our ex-MPs, Andrew Lansley, was nearly invisible in the constituency. Some Conservative MPs can also treat their constituents with contempt. In the case of South Cambridgeshire, the damage might lead us to turning to the yellow peril at the next election if Anthony Browne cannot turn things around.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
Can you elaborate what you mean by contempt?
Utter dripping contempt for their voter base. I can think of so many sitting and now former Labour councillors who thought the voters were stupid / racist / ignorant and needed to be told what their issues were and what needed to be done.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
They’re better off dropping business rates on the High St, keeping them on out of-town retail, and finding the savings from elsewhere in the departmental budget. Also incentivise councils to allow housebuilding, directing cash away from the NIMBYs towards those which permit development.
Not going to work, how do you define a town centre in a way that also doesn't define an out of town shopping centre near some houses.
I could probably find a definition that say excluded Metro Centre / Trafford Centre but that isn't going to work for Stratford or Meadowhall.
I’m saying come at it from the opposite end. The High St is an existing road, through the middle of a town, and if your shop is there it gets a zero business rates rating. Massive shopping centres can drop their rents if they want to attract new businesses. Their cost of finance is a fraction of what they thought it would be a couple of decades ago.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
I could not have put it better myself.
I think what these people are fed up of hearing from Labour is negativity, they want some more passion, some more energy.
I believe Wales is the best example of where Labour has done this and run with it. They are the Welsh Party for many, because they are very pro Wales.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
Remembering #DesmondTutu: “I would not worship a God who is homophobic… I have to tell you, I cannot keep quiet when people are penalised for something about which they can do nothing… I oppose such injustice with the same passion that I opposed apartheid.”
There is nothing in the New Testament about homosexuality, unlike the Old Testament or Koran
OTOH Jesus was a Jewish rabbi anyway, so the OT was the default rule book. Presumably, for instance, he didn't eat pork.
Christians base their philosophy on Christ's teaching unlike Jews and not Muhammad's unlike Muslims. Paul is also only a secondary influence to Christians compared to Jesus Christ
He maybe should be, but he really, really isn't. In fact, looked at over the centuries Paul's teachings have been considerably more influential than those of Jesus, particularly in the Catholic Church.
When I did New Testament Studies, we spent about six weeks on Pauline ethics and a whole hour on The Sermon on the Mount.
I am not Roman Catholic, I am Anglican.
The Anglican Episcopal Church in the US and Church of Wales already allow gay couples blessings
I don't care what you are. Facts do not change according to your denomination Hyufd. The quality of music does, of course.
Actually they do. The Anglican church has women priests unlike the Roman Catholic Church, is more open to marrying divorcees than the Catholic Church and is now more willing to provide gay blessings than the Roman Catholic Church or the evangelical Baptist and Pentecostal churches are
Boris will not announce any new restrictions for England today.
Fun times Boris is back and will allow vaccinated people in England to pub and club at New Year's eve to their hearts content. Unlike the Welsh and Scots where Sturgeon and Drakeford have shut nightclubs and made restaurants and bars table service only
5....4....3....2....1.....Now on BBC News / Sky News, we are joined by .... member of SAGE, who is speaking in a personal capacity....this is highly irresponsible behaviour by the PM, the evidence is clear, we need to lockdown....
No, only leftwing statists like you now want lockdowns post vaccination.
Boris knows who his coalition is and is correctly not going to risk leakage to RefUK by imposing another lockdown. Freedom Boris wins as he did in 2019, authoritarian Boris won't.
Boris like Trump now against further restrictions. Starmer Labour even more than Biden for more restrictions
Like me......you have gone proper bonkers haven't you. It feels like some Tories such as yourself are becoming the "why don't you f##k off and join the lefties" to anybody who says anything perceive you disagree with.
Read the post, I am taking the piss that this will be happening like it does every time. Find a post where I said I want another lockdown....you won't, because I haven't...I have said that there is a extreme push for it from some quarters and I think Boris will give in for January enhanced restrictions (you disagree, which is fine).
In fact I have repeatedly said I am very comfortable about the situation post vaccination and that although I expect all of us to catch COVID at some point, I don't think for the fit and healthy it is anything more to worry about than every other possible disease you could encounter.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
Can you elaborate what you mean by contempt?
Well, I might mention MPs like the late Stuart Bell, who was happy to always appear on TV, but rarely, if ever, held surgeries in his constituency. He preferred to spend his time in London or France rather than Middlesborough. Or (dare I say it) the Beast of Bolsover, whose thinking about what his constituency required did not evolve over the decades.
It's not just Labour: one of our ex-MPs, Andrew Lansley, was nearly invisible in the constituency. Some Conservative MPs can also treat their constituents with contempt. In the case of South Cambridgeshire, the damage might lead us to turning to the yellow peril at the next election if Anthony Browne cannot turn things around.
Ah, I see. Fair enough and something Labour needs to work on is the quality of MPs they are putting into place. This was something that was very much under-appreciated in the Corbyn years and we now have morons like Zarah Sultana.
Boris will not announce any new restrictions for England today.
Fun times Boris is back and will allow vaccinated people in England to pub and club at New Year's eve to their hearts content. Unlike the Welsh and Scots where Sturgeon and Drakeford have shut nightclubs and made restaurants and bars table service only
5....4....3....2....1.....Now on BBC News / Sky News, we are joined by .... member of SAGE, who is speaking in a personal capacity....this is highly irresponsible behaviour by the PM, the evidence is clear, we need to lockdown....
No, only leftwing statists like you now want lockdowns post vaccination.
Boris knows who his coalition is and is correctly not going to risk leakage to RefUK by imposing another lockdown. Freedom Boris wins as he did in 2019, authoritarian Boris won't.
Boris like Trump now against further restrictions. Starmer Labour even more than Biden for more restrictions
Can’t recall what FU’s general position is on restrictions, but pretty sure that his post was laced with irony (as well as expected reality...)
I do think in the late 2010s and into 2019, Labour had lost touch, I am not sure how to put that better.
I have said before, I do think Labour should be in favour of strong controls on immigration now. I am personally pro FOM but it's clear the country is not and we've left the EU now. Is that me disrespecting my principles, I don't know
Boris will not announce any new restrictions for England today.
Fun times Boris is back and will allow vaccinated people in England to pub and club at New Year's eve to their hearts content. Unlike the Welsh and Scots where Sturgeon and Drakeford have shut nightclubs and made restaurants and bars table service only
5....4....3....2....1.....Now on BBC News / Sky News, we are joined by .... member of SAGE, who is speaking in a personal capacity....this is highly irresponsible behaviour by the PM, the evidence is clear, we need to lockdown....
No, only leftwing statists like you now want lockdowns post vaccination.
Boris knows who his coalition is and is correctly not going to risk leakage to RefUK by imposing another lockdown. Freedom Boris wins as he did in 2019, authoritarian Boris won't.
Boris like Trump now against further restrictions. Starmer Labour even more than Biden for more restrictions
Like me......you have gone proper bonkers haven't you. It feels like some Tories such as yourself are becoming the "why don't you f##k off and join the lefties" to anybody who says anything perceive you disagree with.
Read the post, I am taking the piss that this will be happening like it does every time. Find a post where I said I want another lockdown....you won't, because I haven't...I have said that there is a extreme push for it from some quarters and I think Boris will give in for January enhanced restrictions (you disagree, which is fine).
In fact I have repeatedly said I am very comfortable about the situation post vaccination and that although I expect all of us to catch COVID at some point, I don't think for the fit and healthy it is anything more to worry about than every other possible disease you could encounter.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
I think post 2008 is when Labour went really wrong to be honest, that was the time to re-build the economy afresh in the image of the Norwegian model and we completely failed
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
I knocked on a lot of doors and talked to a lot of voters. Too many foreigners was the catch-all answer to explain why the NE had been left behind. It didn't matter that they lived (one example) in a town that was almost entirely white. The forrin menace lived elsewhere and were definitely why there weren't better jobs available.
The real issue post 2008 was simple - austerity. The coalition believed that money wasn't available and didn't invest nationally. The largely Labour councils in these areas basically didn't ever try and just said "blame the Tories". So people have voted for the party who have largely been responsible for the lack of investment having become utterly fed up with lazy local and regional Labour people making excuses. But as the Tories are failing miserably delivering on their "unicorns for all" promised they will struggle to hold many of them.
I really don't want to pull the site down any further so am quite happy to apologise to @BartholomewRoberts if it means we can put this issue to bed
You are a bigger man, for a horse, than I, though being a woman, because I thought it sounded like bartholephillips should be tucked up in bed! 🤣
Who would win in a fight, a horse sized rabbit, or a rabbit sized horse?
Cue an old joke about statistics: During WWII, a farmer was selling "rabbit pies" at a very reasonable price. "How come your rabbit pies are so cheap?" "To be honest, I mix in a little horse meat." "How much?" "Half-and-half, 50-50 ... one rabbit, one horse"
On Scotland, I just want the Tories to lose seats. If that means an SNP clean sweep, that's fine by me.
This logic is fine for an English person.
Compare and contrast with the kool-aid overdose that is @Farooq
What the fuck are you on about?
I think he's a tiny bit upset that his staunch support for the Conservatives in the NE looks as if it might be undermined by your positing the possibility of voting for the SNP in order to exclude the Tory chap.
Which is exactly the same position Sandy seemed to be advocating? The man's a basket case. Not Sandy, I mean.
In case you didn't see my addition - JB often uses the term 'SNP koolaid' and similar to denote what he thinks 'SNP types' must be drinking etc. Just to save you puzzling over it.
Considering the thread as a whole: it has been rather fractious. I do wonder if some of us are suffering from hangovers. Anyway, had a nice black pudding and egg roll for lunch after a successful experiment with Itsu gyoza in soup, so back to my research paper now.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
Gove is a marmite character, but he is a spectacularly productive and innovative cabinet minister. The contrast with Robert Jenrick, his predecessor (and a man once regarded as a rising star) is huge. Jenrick seemed to be just treading water, following orders from the treasury and No.10 and incapable of spotting the political catastrophes that would inevitably follow. Gove is quickly coming up with ideas of his own, some of them quite good.
And some (like this one) make as much sense as Boris's bridge to Belfast.
I don't agree. I can tell you from the bitter experience of Dundee that there are few things as depressing as a town centre that is boarded up and deserted. We need to save our town centres, both because of the employment they bring and the community they create.
We need to do a variety of things to achieve this. Firstly, and probably most importantly, we need to rebalance the playing field between the online and bricks and mortar retailer. At the moment this is heavily weighed in favour of the online supplier who pays a fraction of the business rates that the B&M retailer does because, historically, town centre shops have been seen as cash cows ready to be milked. We also need to improve transport into town, parking, the availability of charging points, a broader range of permitted uses for old retail and to increase the number of people actually living there. It is not a sufficient policy but it is a start. And it is going to be absolutely central to the levelling up agenda.
The biggest problem is the pyramid that has been built on the back of town centre shops. Quite simply town centre shops are not worth *that* much money any more.
I had this conversation with an Abingdon town councillor, years ago. He literally could not accept that the river of money was gone.
This effects the landlords, the tenants, the councils and the government.
There are a few choices -
1) Recognise that due to the enormous pressures on hosing costs caused by planning limits, that turning town centres into more homes is infinitely more profitable than keeping the shops*. 2) Accept a massive reduction in taxation, rents etc to match the actual footfall/spend. This includes a lot of landlords going bust. 3) Increase the cost of other ways to shop by about 100%
*Where I live, the council insisted in retail units on the ground floor of new developments. Which, in some cases are now still empty after a *decade*.
That's a massive problem, because for the last couple of decades new shopping centres has been the go-to way to regenerate towns. Romford, to take an extreme example, has at least one more complex than it can really support- so there are vacant sites, some fairly meh shops and big distances to walk between shops.
Romford is especially unlucky- it's been hit by both Lakeside and Stratford. But even without the online effect (who needs classic department stores any more?), there's more shop space than is useful. But it will be hard to shrink in a coherent way.
We have to have rezoning in our town centres - changing shops back into houses. One thing I always say: many (albeit not all) shops in towns are actually not in bad buildings, that could be made into homes once more by rebuilding the ground floor. You can then either have them as flats (many shops have flats above anyway), or as full family houses.
It's a better solution than having boarded-up shops that slowly degenerate.
So the question becomes: what do we want from our town centres?
Already happening here in my small town - helped by the fact that the old shops were shops + houses anyway. A number of shops on the fringe of the centre have become all houses over the last decade or two with the shop window infilled or even retained. Mind, they are in an area which used to be the main transit route to the local factory, which no longer exists.
I don't know about the planning rules in Scotland, but in England the government have already effectively rezoned town centres as housing by allowing a permitted change from all employment uses to residential. That came in within the last year or so. So the only shops that won't be changed back to housing are those that are uneconomic for conversion or are prime retail. It is all a bit more complex than that, but this is the jist. There is always a time lag of a few years before these changes actually happen on the ground, but they inevitably will.
Given this background, any campaign to 'save shops' and abolish business rates makes no sense because shops are already wiped out by the drive for low cost slum housing of the type that many shop conversions provide, given that they basically look out on main roads where passers by can stare in to your front living room. Who wants to live there? No one by choice, just people who have no other option. This is all, incidentally, a way for the government to deliver new housing without having to make strategic decisions about which parts of the countryside get built on.
At the same time the government publish national palnning policy that tries to support the vitality of town centres and the shops in them, and also seeks to achieve beauty and a high standard of design in housing development. Nothing the government does in this policy area makes any sense at all, it is totally insane and irrational. Perhaps Gove will get his head around it, but the probability of him doing anything useful is ultimately low, because that would involve undoing a decades worth of bad policy and law initiated by the conservative party.
Interesting. In the case of my small town the conversions - which would, I think, need planning permission - are on the fringes in streets which were in any case partly residential - so it just means that the shops peter out a little closer to the core centre. There's been some conversion of shops into things like solicitors' and vets' operations as well and the big Co-op department store (small by city standards) became flats on the upper levels. And one derelict villa converted to shop did get demolished for flats. But on the whole the main shopping area has remained, albeit with a few empty shops and some charity operations. No sense (yet) of what you describe; in fact a derelict area on the main street was redeveloped with relatively high quality council housing.
Yes it sounds like it is a successful transformation driven by effective planning controls; the opposite to what the government in England are doing.
Re: financial crises in TfL. Difficult to know where “blame” lies - it seems to me a bit of everywhere. Johnson obviously chucked money up the wall. The Govt substantially cut its subsidy. Khan froze fares for years (FFS I travel on buses all the time and £1.55 a journey, multiple trips within an hour, and daily cap of a fiver is ridiculous!). It still seems to me to spend ludicrous amounts of money on projects of dubious merit (20mph zones everywhere?).
And then of course Covid struck which is basically an insoluble problem.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
I knocked on a lot of doors and talked to a lot of voters. Too many foreigners was the catch-all answer to explain why the NE had been left behind. It didn't matter that they lived (one example) in a town that was almost entirely white. The forrin menace lived elsewhere and were definitely why there weren't better jobs available.
The real issue post 2008 was simple - austerity. The coalition believed that money wasn't available and didn't invest nationally. The largely Labour councils in these areas basically didn't ever try and just said "blame the Tories". So people have voted for the party who have largely been responsible for the lack of investment having become utterly fed up with lazy local and regional Labour people making excuses. But as the Tories are failing miserably delivering on their "unicorns for all" promised they will struggle to hold many of them.
It was not defending Labour's record that was also the problem. Utterly embarrassed of what had happened and Ed M especially just tried to distance himself, I remember he grew a backbone during GE15 but he should have done that five years prior
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
Gove is a marmite character, but he is a spectacularly productive and innovative cabinet minister. The contrast with Robert Jenrick, his predecessor (and a man once regarded as a rising star) is huge. Jenrick seemed to be just treading water, following orders from the treasury and No.10 and incapable of spotting the political catastrophes that would inevitably follow. Gove is quickly coming up with ideas of his own, some of them quite good.
And some (like this one) make as much sense as Boris's bridge to Belfast.
I don't agree. I can tell you from the bitter experience of Dundee that there are few things as depressing as a town centre that is boarded up and deserted. We need to save our town centres, both because of the employment they bring and the community they create.
We need to do a variety of things to achieve this. Firstly, and probably most importantly, we need to rebalance the playing field between the online and bricks and mortar retailer. At the moment this is heavily weighed in favour of the online supplier who pays a fraction of the business rates that the B&M retailer does because, historically, town centre shops have been seen as cash cows ready to be milked. We also need to improve transport into town, parking, the availability of charging points, a broader range of permitted uses for old retail and to increase the number of people actually living there. It is not a sufficient policy but it is a start. And it is going to be absolutely central to the levelling up agenda.
The biggest problem is the pyramid that has been built on the back of town centre shops. Quite simply town centre shops are not worth *that* much money any more.
I had this conversation with an Abingdon town councillor, years ago. He literally could not accept that the river of money was gone.
This effects the landlords, the tenants, the councils and the government.
There are a few choices -
1) Recognise that due to the enormous pressures on hosing costs caused by planning limits, that turning town centres into more homes is infinitely more profitable than keeping the shops*. 2) Accept a massive reduction in taxation, rents etc to match the actual footfall/spend. This includes a lot of landlords going bust. 3) Increase the cost of other ways to shop by about 100%
*Where I live, the council insisted in retail units on the ground floor of new developments. Which, in some cases are now still empty after a *decade*.
That's a massive problem, because for the last couple of decades new shopping centres has been the go-to way to regenerate towns. Romford, to take an extreme example, has at least one more complex than it can really support- so there are vacant sites, some fairly meh shops and big distances to walk between shops.
Romford is especially unlucky- it's been hit by both Lakeside and Stratford. But even without the online effect (who needs classic department stores any more?), there's more shop space than is useful. But it will be hard to shrink in a coherent way.
We have to have rezoning in our town centres - changing shops back into houses. One thing I always say: many (albeit not all) shops in towns are actually not in bad buildings, that could be made into homes once more by rebuilding the ground floor. You can then either have them as flats (many shops have flats above anyway), or as full family houses.
It's a better solution than having boarded-up shops that slowly degenerate.
So the question becomes: what do we want from our town centres?
Already happening here in my small town - helped by the fact that the old shops were shops + houses anyway. A number of shops on the fringe of the centre have become all houses over the last decade or two with the shop window infilled or even retained. Mind, they are in an area which used to be the main transit route to the local factory, which no longer exists.
I don't know about the planning rules in Scotland, but in England the government have already effectively rezoned town centres as housing by allowing a permitted change from all employment uses to residential. That came in within the last year or so. So the only shops that won't be changed back to housing are those that are uneconomic for conversion or are prime retail. It is all a bit more complex than that, but this is the jist. There is always a time lag of a few years before these changes actually happen on the ground, but they inevitably will.
Given this background, any campaign to 'save shops' and abolish business rates makes no sense because shops are already wiped out by the drive for low cost slum housing of the type that many shop conversions provide, given that they basically look out on main roads where passers by can stare in to your front living room. Who wants to live there? No one by choice, just people who have no other option. This is all, incidentally, a way for the government to deliver new housing without having to make strategic decisions about which parts of the countryside get built on.
At the same time the government publish national palnning policy that tries to support the vitality of town centres and the shops in them, and also seeks to achieve beauty and a high standard of design in housing development. Nothing the government does in this policy area makes any sense at all, it is totally insane and irrational. Perhaps Gove will get his head around it, but the probability of him doing anything useful is ultimately low, because that would involve undoing a decades worth of bad policy and law initiated by the conservative party.
Interesting. In the case of my small town the conversions - which would, I think, need planning permission - are on the fringes in streets which were in any case partly residential - so it just means that the shops peter out a little closer to the core centre. There's been some conversion of shops into things like solicitors' and vets' operations as well and the big Co-op department store (small by city standards) became flats on the upper levels. And one derelict villa converted to shop did get demolished for flats. But on the whole the main shopping area has remained, albeit with a few empty shops and some charity operations. No sense (yet) of what you describe; in fact a derelict area on the main street was redeveloped with relatively high quality council housing.
Yes it sounds like it is a successful transformation driven by effective planning controls; the opposite to what the government in England are doing.
I do hope so. So far as I can see some of the shops here simply ended up as additional rooms to the preexisting houses above, and it's not too busy a place anyway. The one really commercial to residential location, the Co-op mini dept store, was pretty generously built in any case.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
We’ve heard about a so called green revolution in the north for years nothing has ever come to fruition. We need action not words. @NickPalmer had some interesting thoughts.
We do need good public transport which means more than a few extra buses on already crowded roads
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
If you don't invest now, you are destined to subsidise vast parts of the country for ever.
or would you prefer that.
Remember Dundee is one of the biggest areas for game development in Europe, yet because that is the only industry there you complain about the town centre being boarded up as people head towards Edinburgh to shop and for entertainment.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
It doesn't have the worse absolute poverty but it has the worst relative poverty.
The “P-word” is one of the most abused words in the English language.
I’m currently reading “‘Rationality” by Steven Pinker, who points out that there are fewer people on Earth living in poverty now than has ever been the case, and that Western campaign groups have tried their best to redefine the team to mean inequality.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
I'm a long-standing advocate of commercial state-owned enterprise. Its what the Germans and others are very good at. Fully privatised are often profiteering monopolies, fully state controlled lack in cash and permission to actually get stuff done.
So lets have an EDF or a Deutsche Bahn. Commercially run with actual industry leaders making them work, but able to borrow at government rates. And actually invest in the things we need which all pay back a return on that investment. Its called capitalism, but when its being done for national strategic reasons there has to be a state framework as well.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
It doesn't have the worse absolute poverty but it has the worst relative poverty.
The “P-word” is one of the most abused words in the English language.
I’m currently reading “‘Rationality” by Steven Pinker, who points out that there are fewer people on Earth living in poverty now than has ever been the case, and that Western campaign groups have tried their best to redefine the team to mean inequality.
Must get round to reading that.
Even the academic who coined the "relative poverty" metric says it has been abused and was never designed to be used in the way Gordon Brown took it and now become normalised. It the equivalent of the Wuhan report use of the term "mild", it was meant to define COVID as a mild disease, it was a way to delineate from those being hospitalised.
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
Gove is a marmite character, but he is a spectacularly productive and innovative cabinet minister. The contrast with Robert Jenrick, his predecessor (and a man once regarded as a rising star) is huge. Jenrick seemed to be just treading water, following orders from the treasury and No.10 and incapable of spotting the political catastrophes that would inevitably follow. Gove is quickly coming up with ideas of his own, some of them quite good.
And some (like this one) make as much sense as Boris's bridge to Belfast.
I don't agree. I can tell you from the bitter experience of Dundee that there are few things as depressing as a town centre that is boarded up and deserted. We need to save our town centres, both because of the employment they bring and the community they create.
We need to do a variety of things to achieve this. Firstly, and probably most importantly, we need to rebalance the playing field between the online and bricks and mortar retailer. At the moment this is heavily weighed in favour of the online supplier who pays a fraction of the business rates that the B&M retailer does because, historically, town centre shops have been seen as cash cows ready to be milked. We also need to improve transport into town, parking, the availability of charging points, a broader range of permitted uses for old retail and to increase the number of people actually living there. It is not a sufficient policy but it is a start. And it is going to be absolutely central to the levelling up agenda.
The biggest problem is the pyramid that has been built on the back of town centre shops. Quite simply town centre shops are not worth *that* much money any more.
I had this conversation with an Abingdon town councillor, years ago. He literally could not accept that the river of money was gone.
This effects the landlords, the tenants, the councils and the government.
There are a few choices -
1) Recognise that due to the enormous pressures on hosing costs caused by planning limits, that turning town centres into more homes is infinitely more profitable than keeping the shops*. 2) Accept a massive reduction in taxation, rents etc to match the actual footfall/spend. This includes a lot of landlords going bust. 3) Increase the cost of other ways to shop by about 100%
*Where I live, the council insisted in retail units on the ground floor of new developments. Which, in some cases are now still empty after a *decade*.
That's a massive problem, because for the last couple of decades new shopping centres has been the go-to way to regenerate towns. Romford, to take an extreme example, has at least one more complex than it can really support- so there are vacant sites, some fairly meh shops and big distances to walk between shops.
Romford is especially unlucky- it's been hit by both Lakeside and Stratford. But even without the online effect (who needs classic department stores any more?), there's more shop space than is useful. But it will be hard to shrink in a coherent way.
We have to have rezoning in our town centres - changing shops back into houses. One thing I always say: many (albeit not all) shops in towns are actually not in bad buildings, that could be made into homes once more by rebuilding the ground floor. You can then either have them as flats (many shops have flats above anyway), or as full family houses.
It's a better solution than having boarded-up shops that slowly degenerate.
So the question becomes: what do we want from our town centres?
Already happening here in my small town - helped by the fact that the old shops were shops + houses anyway. A number of shops on the fringe of the centre have become all houses over the last decade or two with the shop window infilled or even retained. Mind, they are in an area which used to be the main transit route to the local factory, which no longer exists.
I don't know about the planning rules in Scotland, but in England the government have already effectively rezoned town centres as housing by allowing a permitted change from all employment uses to residential. That came in within the last year or so. So the only shops that won't be changed back to housing are those that are uneconomic for conversion or are prime retail. It is all a bit more complex than that, but this is the jist. There is always a time lag of a few years before these changes actually happen on the ground, but they inevitably will.
Given this background, any campaign to 'save shops' and abolish business rates makes no sense because shops are already wiped out by the drive for low cost slum housing of the type that many shop conversions provide, given that they basically look out on main roads where passers by can stare in to your front living room. Who wants to live there? No one by choice, just people who have no other option. This is all, incidentally, a way for the government to deliver new housing without having to make strategic decisions about which parts of the countryside get built on.
At the same time the government publish national palnning policy that tries to support the vitality of town centres and the shops in them, and also seeks to achieve beauty and a high standard of design in housing development. Nothing the government does in this policy area makes any sense at all, it is totally insane and irrational. Perhaps Gove will get his head around it, but the probability of him doing anything useful is ultimately low, because that would involve undoing a decades worth of bad policy and law initiated by the conservative party.
Interesting. In the case of my small town the conversions - which would, I think, need planning permission - are on the fringes in streets which were in any case partly residential - so it just means that the shops peter out a little closer to the core centre. There's been some conversion of shops into things like solicitors' and vets' operations as well and the big Co-op department store (small by city standards) became flats on the upper levels. And one derelict villa converted to shop did get demolished for flats. But on the whole the main shopping area has remained, albeit with a few empty shops and some charity operations. No sense (yet) of what you describe; in fact a derelict area on the main street was redeveloped with relatively high quality council housing.
Yes it sounds like it is a successful transformation driven by effective planning controls; the opposite to what the government in England are doing.
I do hope so. So far as I can see some of the shops here simply ended up as additional rooms to the preexisting houses above, and it's not too busy a place anyway. The one really commercial to residential location, the Co-op mini dept store, was pretty generously built in any case.
It's actually what is happening in the South as well - at least where the councils are admitting the truth.
The local council did all kinds of stupid stuff - like refusing planning permission for conversion of pubs. So we have a number of pubs which are now homes (can't stop that) but unconverted. Their other special is demanding retail in new developments. Apart from the fact that the new developments already constructed have empty retail below them......
The "local shops" debate comes down to - "What are these Locale Olde Shoppes selling? And to whom?"
Michael Gove is prepared to “go to war” with Rishi Sunak as he pushes to exempt high-street retailers from paying business rates as part of his levelling-up agenda, The Times has been told.
Gove, the levelling-up secretary, wants a radical overhaul of the commercial property tax because he views it as one of the most effective ways of achieving tangible change in crucial red wall seats before the next election.
He is said to be in favour of funding it by introducing an online sales tax, which would effectively add extra VAT to purchases made over the internet. Sunak, the chancellor, is resisting wholesale changes to business rates, which bring in £25 billion per year and are relatively easy to collect in comparison with other taxes. He is said to be sceptical about an online sales tax.
The Treasury will do everything they can to avoid business rate changes and exactly how does an online sales tax work?
Does it count if the good is delivered to a store rather than a home? How about delivery to the corner shop?
It's going to get utterly insane incredibly quickly.
I just don't see how this idea is going to level up the Red Wall, is the idea to discourage shopping online?
The damage to Red Wall town centres comes more from out of town shopping than online shopping - it doesn't help and shows how much Gove and co are clutching at straws.
Want to win Red Wall seats, spend money on them nowt else is going to work.
It seems to me that they basically don't have any ideas beyond the slogans. And this was obvious in GE19 to me
As a red wall town dweller what ideas does labour have ?
I think genuine investment rather than cuts over the last decade would have done a lot more for the Red Wall.
New Labour did the most levelling up of any Government in recent memory
Sorry, that is utter bilge. Labour did little for the red wall. You may be a labour fanboy and think they can do no wrong but under labour our manufacturing as a percentage of gdp halved, we lost 1/6th of our manufacturing jobs and companies closed and moved to Eastern Europe. New labour were obsessed with the so called future industries. They allowed the red wall to decline simply because they used to weigh votes here as opposed to count them.
Not a Labour fanboy dude, I've voted Tory and Lib Dem in the past, just think Labour are the best option at the moment.
The numbers don't lie, New Labour did a tremendous amount of the Red Wall, more than the Tories have done. What have the Tories done for the Red Wall?
Could Labour have done more, hell yes.
What did labour do for us ? Under labour, both govt and local govt, my town went from thriving to on its knees.
I don’t expect the Tories to do stuff for us, I expected labour to. They did sweet FA. The Tories made a promise. So far have failed. Let’s see what labour offer. They cannot take our votes for granted and do nothing for us in future
Factories closed, well paying jobs went offshore and young people moved away, but let’s celebrate a sure start centre.
Anyway weren’t your whining the other week that levelling was punishing the rich and affluent south.
No I said genuine levelling up is not making the south poorer. It's about levelling up the entire country.
No one is talking about making the south poorer. It’s not in our interests to do that and it’s levelling up not down. There’s the clue !
No, you cried and whine about London being punished when that was not the case.
Just look at the investment per head in transport for London compared to the north east ?
The south and London benefits from young people from the regions, educated and bright, moving there from the regions for the opportunities. But the moment the regions want some levelling up you’re the victim,
What, however, will happen because of the cancellation of HS2E and NPR is that subsidises elsewhere will be highlighted.
And that is going to create great problems because any penny spent to support TfL will be used up North to regain Red Wall seats - as it's an incredibly easy story - London got £xbn a year on trains yet you get zero).
And TfL needs subsidies so it's a very quick win.
A very quick win and, as @RochdalePioneers says, voters up here are not fools. It will play badly and labour will make hay with it and the Tories have no defence.
We need to be clear about two things. The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. And awful lot. And that they failed to change the long term decline of many areas and decided that "blame the Tories" was enough to keep getting re-elected.
Yes the oceans of money spent on health and education and social mobility and waiting lists and poverty made a huge difference to people. But without any change in prospects and the loss of pride and town image when generational heavy industry jobs got replaced by warehouse jobs, it didn't take much pushing for people say "we've been done over".
The Tories either deliver rapidly on their grand promises or they will lose most of the red wall back to Labour. Not an enthusiastic vote, but "we did tell you it was the Tories fault" will now resonate in a way it had ceased to do so.
"The New Labour government did a lot for people in the red wall. "
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
I agree and disagree. When your kids are in a school literally held upright by an endoskeleton fitted to hold up ceilings, when you are working flat out for £2.20 and hour and are in grinding poverty, when you are in pain with a chronic condition where there's an 18-month waiting list to even see a specialist, you don't dismiss that New Labour shopping list.
But it needed to kick on having levelled up the worst of the effects of the Tory era and largely failed to do so.
And the Conservatives were just trying to address the worst effects of the Labour years in the 1970s.
The problem with education is that the rates of illiteracy and/or innumeracy barely change over the years. After a few lacklustre and failed attempts at helping those falling behind, New Labour massive concentrated on the top ends of education - hence the stupid 50% uni target. Whereas the country's real issues with education are at the bottom end. But that is much more intractable and generates fewer positive headlines.
I'd vote for a party that really talked about this issue and tried to address it. Functional illiteracy and innumeracy is a national scandal and a personal tragedy for those people.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
@MaxPB Is off to see it today so could let you know later.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
I knocked on a lot of doors and talked to a lot of voters. Too many foreigners was the catch-all answer to explain why the NE had been left behind. It didn't matter that they lived (one example) in a town that was almost entirely white. The forrin menace lived elsewhere and were definitely why there weren't better jobs available.
The real issue post 2008 was simple - austerity. The coalition believed that money wasn't available and didn't invest nationally. The largely Labour councils in these areas basically didn't ever try and just said "blame the Tories". So people have voted for the party who have largely been responsible for the lack of investment having become utterly fed up with lazy local and regional Labour people making excuses. But as the Tories are failing miserably delivering on their "unicorns for all" promised they will struggle to hold many of them.
Sorry but the Labour councils had zero money as soon as austerity hit.
Darlington was particularly badly effected, I had one meeting where the council begged me to turn the school into the academy as they needed the £25k they got from the application to cover some costs at another school.
For a lot of North East councils the budget is now social care and legal minimum requirements for everything else - as that's all that is left once Osbourne stole the council tax transfers.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I haven't seen the latest film, but I've really enjoyed this series so far. It has a certain charm and comedy. Its still not a patch on 'into the Spider-Verse', though.
I wouldn't show the previous films to my seven year-old though - and I do let him watch some fairly advanced things at times (he loves Father Brown and Johnathon Creek).
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
It doesn't have the worse absolute poverty but it has the worst relative poverty.
The “P-word” is one of the most abused words in the English language.
I’m currently reading “‘Rationality” by Steven Pinker, who points out that there are fewer people on Earth living in poverty now than has ever been the case, and that Western campaign groups have tried their best to redefine the team to mean inequality.
Must get round to reading that.
Even the academic who coined the "relative poverty" metric says it has been abused and was never designed to be used in the way Gordon Brown took it and now become normalised. It the equivalent of the Wuhan report use of the term "mild", it was meant to define COVID as a mild disease, it was a way to delineate from those being hospitalised.
How do you distinguish between a mild disease, and a disease that doesn't require hospitalisation?
Cancer, heart problems, diabetes and Covid that requires hospitalisation etc can all be serious diseases.
If you need a week or two of bed rest to get better from a virus then surely that is "mild" even if you feel pretty rotten for that week or two?
In my pension, in shares, in some physical tangible assets, in other things.
But this money I invest comes from reducing my current consumption.
Are the people who want more 'investment' willing to do that ?
And if so what current consumption would they be willing to reduce ?
Governments don't work like that.
If you want the north to be as productive as the south (and productivity = tax revenue) you need to make up for 20 years of investment that was made down south and not spent up north due to dodgy economic models used by the Treasury.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
If you don't invest now, you are destined to subsidise vast parts of the country for ever.
or would you prefer that.
Remember Dundee is one of the biggest areas for game development in Europe, yet because that is the only industry there you complain about the town centre being boarded up as people head towards Edinburgh to shop and for entertainment.
Game development in Dundee employs dozens of people, some of whom are no doubt doing very well, so well they haven't got around to a new GTA yet.
We currently have pretty much full employment and that is pushing up wages (good) and inflation (bad). Our deficit is also causing inflation as is the printing of money (although weirdly slowly). Not all of that employment demand is in the same places people live or can afford to live and that is a problem but we already have excess demand (as shown by our trade deficit) and are selling our future companies and assets to pay for it.
The room for manoeuvre for the government is disappointingly small but what room there is should be focused on those areas where there is surplus labour and structural deficiencies that discourage inward investment such as transport. I support the levelling up agenda on this basis and Dundee could certainly benefit from it but if we were looking for a starting point for a Keynesian boost it wouldn't be here or anywhere near it.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
As I said, London has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Those people need levelling up just as much as the North.
It doesn't have the worse absolute poverty but it has the worst relative poverty.
The “P-word” is one of the most abused words in the English language.
I’m currently reading “‘Rationality” by Steven Pinker, who points out that there are fewer people on Earth living in poverty now than has ever been the case, and that Western campaign groups have tried their best to redefine the team to mean inequality.
Must get round to reading that.
Even the academic who coined the "relative poverty" metric says it has been abused and was never designed to be used in the way Gordon Brown took it and now become normalised. It the equivalent of the Wuhan report use of the term "mild", it was meant to define COVID as a mild disease, it was a way to delineate from those being hospitalised.
How do you distinguish between a mild disease, and a disease that doesn't require hospitalisation?
Cancer, heart problems, diabetes and Covid that requires hospitalisation etc can all be serious diseases.
If you need a week or two of bed rest to get better from a virus then surely that is "mild" even if you feel pretty rotten for that week or two?
Even the author of the report states they shouldn't have used the term "mild", as it gave the wrong sense of what the disease was like and also misinterpreted by nations e.g. although the rates of long COVID have been overstated, it is true that this is a significant issue even among those who aren't hospitalise, especially when we didn't have vaccinations.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
@MaxPB Is off to see it today so could let you know later.
It's a film rated 12 - so it isn't going to be suitable for a 5 year old nor probably a 7 year old.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
One thing which I think is under-estimated is the resentment that the City, and thereby London, was bailed out in 2008 while the rest of the country was abandoned.
We'd had decades of Labour politicians babbling about 'Fatcha shut the mines and factories' but when it came down to it Labour chose to bail out London bankers while letting the mines and factories close.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Ah the gravity model! You'd do well in the treasury. 😄
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Equally, it's if you aren't careful you end up in a spiral of decline and that's hard to deal with once you are in it.
Austerity or even the closure of something like Sure Start shows the issue, to restart it you end up having to spend all the start up costs a second time round.
Stop start investment is a crap idea but it does seem to be how the Treasury does things rather than seeding a bit of money and seeing what private investment can be encouraged with just a little effort / incentive.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
@MaxPB Is off to see it today so could let you know later.
It's a film rated 12 - so it isn't going to be suitable for a 5 year old nor probably a 7 year old.
The BBFC will have a comment regarding why the movie is a 12A but personally I wouldn't be taking anyone under about 9 to a 12A film.
Not all 12 films are the same. Our kids love the Harry Potter books and films and have seen them all. They've also seen the original trilogy of Star Wars. Though that was easier to determine as we'd seen the films and read the books before they were born, so it was easier to determine what was or wasn't suitable.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
Two post credit scenes.
I was really disappointed not to see my name on the credits. It seemed a reasonable proportion of the western world and a chunk of the eastern one too had been chosen almost at random. I had nothing to do with the film but found it hard to believe all those people did either.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I went with an 11 year old and 8 year old as well as their granddad, all loved it.
This film will not make sense if you've not seen any of the previous Tom Holland films Spidey films, including the MCU films in which he features.
It literally picks up seconds after the end of Far From Home.
In my pension, in shares, in some physical tangible assets, in other things.
But this money I invest comes from reducing my current consumption.
Are the people who want more 'investment' willing to do that ?
And if so what current consumption would they be willing to reduce ?
Governments don't work like that.
If you want the north to be as productive as the south (and productivity = tax revenue) you need to make up for 20 years of investment that was made down south and not spent up north due to dodgy economic models used by the Treasury.
That depends on what that 'investment' is.
There's no shortage of bad investments which lose money rather than increase it.
The idea that all 'investment' is good is not just wrong but also dangerous.
Rather people babbling about 'investment' merely becomes a front for extra spending on wealth consumption, buying votes, subsidising pet projects or in the case of Gordon Brown general derangement.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
One thing which I think is under-estimated is the resentment that the City, and thereby London, was bailed out in 2008 while the rest of the country was abandoned.
We'd had decades of Labour politicians babbling about 'Fatcha shut the mines and factories' but when it came down to it Labour chose to bail out London bankers while letting the mines and factories close.
True, even to the extent of allowing some of the bailed out bankers to head off with large bonuses while the taxpayer bailed out the businesses that had failed
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
@MaxPB Is off to see it today so could let you know later.
It's a film rated 12 - so it isn't going to be suitable for a 5 year old nor probably a 7 year old.
The BBFC will have a comment regarding why the movie is a 12A but personally I wouldn't be taking anyone under about 9 to a 12A film.
Not all 12 films are the same. Our kids love the Harry Potter books and films and have seen them all. They've also seen the original trilogy of Star Wars. Though that was easier to determine as we'd seen the films and read the books before they were born, so it was easier to determine what was or wasn't suitable.
Newer films its harder to know.
I remember my neighbours telling me they had mistakenly watched Logan with their young-ish kids, thinking it was just another super hero film....
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Well, you have assets - the North.
I suppose you could sell the whole thing to China, or just the people. But that's frowned on these days.
So the question becomes - what can you do to get a better return on the assets?
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I went with an 11 year old and 8 year old as well as their granddad, all loved it.
This film will not make sense if you've not seen any of the previous Tom Holland films Spidey films, including the MCU films in which he features.
It literally picks up seconds after the end of Far From Home.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
That's not really the point - the issue is that the country's economic fundamentals are very broken and need fixing. Max is making the point that, by analogy to a company, you can't fix the problems by cutting everything until it works again; you need to refocus on things that make money and do more of those. I sort of agree with this, but I don't think that line of thinking logically leads towards borrowing money to build lots of infrastructure in the North. Maybe it does, but it feels more like we might bankrupt the country before we see a return.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
Two post credit scenes.
I was really disappointed not to see my name on the credits. It seemed a reasonable proportion of the western world and a chunk of the eastern one too had been chosen almost at random. I had nothing to do with the film but found it hard to believe all those people did either.
I think you misunderestimate the number of visual effects that film uses.
On the plus side, at least your surname is used a lot in Succession, and the main character is originally from Dundee.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
One thing Blair was right about was the importance of education.
Unfortunately one aspect of Blair's strategy has led to an overblown university sector with now millions being in tens of thousands in debt from their 'investment'.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I went with an 11 year old and 8 year old as well as their granddad, all loved it.
This film will not make sense if you've not seen any of the previous Tom Holland films Spidey films, including the MCU films in which he features.
It literally picks up seconds after the end of Far From Home.
Do any of the MCU films make any sense?
They do.
Do not diss the MCU in my presence, it's like telling me you like eating Hawaiian pizzas whilst watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve on speed to the infinite power.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I went with an 11 year old and 8 year old as well as their granddad, all loved it.
This film will not make sense if you've not seen any of the previous Tom Holland films Spidey films, including the MCU films in which he features.
It literally picks up seconds after the end of Far From Home.
Do any of the MCU films make any sense?
They do.
Do not diss the MCU in my presence, it's like telling me you like eating Hawaiian pizzas whilst watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve on speed to the infinite power.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
@MaxPB Is off to see it today so could let you know later.
It's a film rated 12 - so it isn't going to be suitable for a 5 year old nor probably a 7 year old.
The BBFC will have a comment regarding why the movie is a 12A but personally I wouldn't be taking anyone under about 9 to a 12A film.
Not all 12 films are the same. Our kids love the Harry Potter books and films and have seen them all. They've also seen the original trilogy of Star Wars. Though that was easier to determine as we'd seen the films and read the books before they were born, so it was easier to determine what was or wasn't suitable.
Newer films its harder to know.
I remember my neighbours telling me they had mistakenly watched Logan with their young-ish kids, thinking it was just another super hero film....
It could have been worse, they could have taken them to see Deadpool, which absolutely is not another superhero film.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
That's not really the point - the issue is that the country's economic fundamentals are very broken and need fixing. Max is making the point that, by analogy to a company, you can't fix the problems by cutting everything until it works again; you need to refocus on things that make money and do more of those. I sort of agree with this, but I don't think that line of thinking logically leads towards borrowing money to build lots of infrastructure in the North. Maybe it does, but it feels more like we might bankrupt the country before we see a return.
No, my point is that we need to focus on value creation. Sony didn't go from a $12bn market capitalisation to $160bn by value maximisation, there was significant value creation. Make something where nothing previously existed.
Without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for young children? Aged 5 and 7.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
I think it stands alone. There is enough of the backstory filled in to allow it to do that. I think some of the plotting would defeat kids of that age but the violence was pretty cartoon level and there was no nudity etc. There is one sad bit that kids might find upsetting.
Kids of 7 are pretty screen literate but I think 5 would be really pushing it.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Ah the gravity model! You'd do well in the treasury. 😄
I agree with your criticisms of the gravity model, but in the specific situation where debt to GDP is sky high and climbing, and the cost of borrowing is rising because inflation is getting out of control... I don't know.
I am very happy to concede that New Labour did not do enough, particularly in regards to property although this impacted the South more than the North.
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
Hope you don't mind me snipping this. I agree with everything you said about the positive impacts of those Labour governments.
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Oh come on, it is not just about foreign workers. Where are the armies of foreign workers in the North East. It’s also about a recovery from 2008 which passed some regions in the country by. House price inflation may have been massive in the south and south east. It is positively glacial in many parts of the north. We came out of 2008 and some regions did remarkably well, others got left behind and no one did anything about it. I remember a town hall event in Newcastle discussing the brexit vote where a remainer said to a man in the audience it would be mad to leave to jeopardise economic growth to which the retort was this was London’s Growth. I agree the three you mentioned are doers. I’d include Andy street in that the north of Tyne guy is a waste of space.
One thing which I think is under-estimated is the resentment that the City, and thereby London, was bailed out in 2008 while the rest of the country was abandoned.
We'd had decades of Labour politicians babbling about 'Fatcha shut the mines and factories' but when it came down to it Labour chose to bail out London bankers while letting the mines and factories close.
True, even to the extent of allowing some of the bailed out bankers to head off with large bonuses while the taxpayer bailed out the businesses that had failed
Indeed.
The contrast of the Goodwins and Applegarths walking away with fortunes while local bank branches shut with their workers getting only statutory redundancy was noticed.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
That's not really the point - the issue is that the country's economic fundamentals are very broken and need fixing. Max is making the point that, by analogy to a company, you can't fix the problems by cutting everything until it works again; you need to refocus on things that make money and do more of those. I sort of agree with this, but I don't think that line of thinking logically leads towards borrowing money to build lots of infrastructure in the North. Maybe it does, but it feels more like we might bankrupt the country before we see a return.
Again that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the infrastructure projects we are talking about.
HS2E is a prime example, it adds 10 fast trains an hour down to London from Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Leeds and Sheffield.
It also adds 24 additional slow trains down the existing ECML and midland mainline routes which can be used for local commuter services or freight.
NPR is the same - the route is currently running at (and beyond capacity) so even keeping current services going is a problem (which is why they are being cut next year because hey needs must). The only way to improve things is again to add another 2 lines and if you are doing that you may as well do it properly.
Now you may not think that the investment is justified but we won't even be able to keep current productivity levels unless this investment is made let alone improve upon them.
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
That's not really the point - the issue is that the country's economic fundamentals are very broken and need fixing. Max is making the point that, by analogy to a company, you can't fix the problems by cutting everything until it works again; you need to refocus on things that make money and do more of those. I sort of agree with this, but I don't think that line of thinking logically leads towards borrowing money to build lots of infrastructure in the North. Maybe it does, but it feels more like we might bankrupt the country before we see a return.
There is actually plenty of money being spent in the North - 60%+ of the GDP of the north is the government, compared to about a third in London. The trouble is, it's spent in a way which could have been designed to do maximum economic damage. It goes on inflated public sector salaries, which are similar to those in the south, despite a vastly lower cost of living, welfare benefits and so on. This creates a hugely damaging dependency culture and throttles private enterprise by increases the price of inputs and reducing the rate of return there.
So rather than subsidising dependency in the north, regional policy should subsidise enterprise, by cutting taxes, cutting public spending, axing damaging regulations and promoting infrastructure and other business-friendly spending. If that doesn't restore dynamism to the north, nothing will.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
Two post credit scenes.
I was really disappointed not to see my name on the credits. It seemed a reasonable proportion of the western world and a chunk of the eastern one too had been chosen almost at random. I had nothing to do with the film but found it hard to believe all those people did either.
I think you misunderestimate the number of visual effects that film uses.
On the plus side, at least your surname is used a lot in Succession, and the main character is originally from Dundee.
The special effects were astounding. Even compared with other MCU films there was an almost Matrix like leap in their quality,
It is time to invest now, massive infrastructure projects, proper house building, proper public transport systems in the North, green energy projects.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
Yep, with our massive trade surplus, our government surplus, our low level of debt, our readily available surplus of labour and inflation completely under control what could possibly go wrong?
Like a company, you can't cut your way to sustainable profitability. Rationalisation and job cuts are only half the story, the other half is achieving some kind of growth. My former employer realised this in the early 2010s and actually began investing in the core business and it has grown 10x in value since the worst days when they started the investment plans and looked beyond job cuts.
So, the question becomes, what is our core business, and what more can we do to help the financial services industry?
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
Surely as a nation our 'core business' is the 67 million people who live in this country?
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
That's not really the point - the issue is that the country's economic fundamentals are very broken and need fixing. Max is making the point that, by analogy to a company, you can't fix the problems by cutting everything until it works again; you need to refocus on things that make money and do more of those. I sort of agree with this, but I don't think that line of thinking logically leads towards borrowing money to build lots of infrastructure in the North. Maybe it does, but it feels more like we might bankrupt the country before we see a return.
There is actually plenty of money being spent in the North - 60%+ of the GDP of the north is the government, compared to about a third in London. The trouble is, it's spent in a way which could have been designed to do maximum economic damage. It goes on inflated public sector salaries, which are similar to those in the south, despite a vastly lower cost of living, welfare benefits and so on. This creates a hugely damaging dependency culture and throttles private enterprise by increases the price of inputs and reducing the rate of return there.
So rather than subsidising dependency in the north, regional policy should subsidise enterprise, by cutting taxes, cutting public spending, axing damaging regulations and promoting infrastructure and other business-friendly spending. If that doesn't restore dynamism to the north, nothing will.
Yep it's 60% plus because it's being spent on Universal Credit and housing benefit because there is no incentive for companies to invest locally.
But you are right without the infrastructure projects no-one is going to invest in the North. And guess what infrastructure projects have been cut (everything in the North East)..
I do think in the late 2010s and into 2019, Labour had lost touch, I am not sure how to put that better.
I have said before, I do think Labour should be in favour of strong controls on immigration now. I am personally pro FOM but it's clear the country is not and we've left the EU now. Is that me disrespecting my principles, I don't know
Despite their improved polling relative to the Tories - the central problem for Labour remains the dichotomy between their 'educated' m/c base in the university towns and big cities and their more traditional supporters from the w/c in the 'red wall' type towns. The views of the former tend to be contemptuous of those of the latter. And it is ever more obvious. I'm not at all sure that they can truly reconcile.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
Two post credit scenes.
I was really disappointed not to see my name on the credits. It seemed a reasonable proportion of the western world and a chunk of the eastern one too had been chosen almost at random. I had nothing to do with the film but found it hard to believe all those people did either.
I think you misunderestimate the number of visual effects that film uses.
On the plus side, at least your surname is used a lot in Succession, and the main character is originally from Dundee.
The special effects were astounding. Even compared with other MCU films there was an almost Matrix like leap in their quality,
If you search for the VFX breakdowns of many blockbuster movies, you will be amazed just how much of it is VFX these days, even things that you think must be at least a real place that they have put the character into e.g. Deadpool entire opening sequence doesn't exist in real life.
Had lunch at Circolo Popolare, was pretty busy lots of people being turned away because they hadn't booked.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
Two post credit scenes.
I was really disappointed not to see my name on the credits. It seemed a reasonable proportion of the western world and a chunk of the eastern one too had been chosen almost at random. I had nothing to do with the film but found it hard to believe all those people did either.
I think you misunderestimate the number of visual effects that film uses.
On the plus side, at least your surname is used a lot in Succession, and the main character is originally from Dundee.
The special effects were astounding. Even compared with other MCU films there was an almost Matrix like leap in their quality,
I watched in it 3D IMAX and it was a visual treat, the leap was something else.
Comments
But I will not accept that New Labour did not level up the Red Wall and the entire country. The statistics and evidence are quite clear on this.
The minimum wage, rebuilding schools that were falling down with holes in the roofs, reducing NHS waiting times to the lowest ever, rebuilding our cities. Tax credits, SureStart. That's real levelling up. It is after 2010 when things started to decline in my view - and Labour had run out of ideas in 2010.
But what I do not like from the current lot is the implication that London somehow doesn't deserve to be levelled up too. Has it had a lot of money spent on it, yes. So let's spend more money on other areas too, it doesn't have to be us and them and I utterly despise as a Londoner (adopted!), being put against the North. We are all one country and one people.
TfL is insanely cheap for the good service it does and the amount of revenue London generates, means it needs good public transport. Does that mean the North should not have it, no. But destroying TfL as the Tories are trying, is not a solution. It's odd how when Johnson was in London and running a massive TfL deficit, there were no concerns about money then, what changed?
Bravemansgame a good call 👍🏻
I don’t know what happened in the KG6, it was fun to watch, and why I don’t back much on chase or big races the favourites came nowhere. The ground was more soft than people thought I think. The winner was worthy at twenty something to one.
Hope things go well Malc. I’ll post some thoughts on New Year’s Day runners for sure.
That's not the case in China.
And that's what the Tories don't get about Khan, he is standing up for London I love, open, tolerant, decent and accepting of the world. I would not want to live in the kind of London the Tories currently imagine.
Anyway, that's enough for me on the London topic for today
I disagree with this. They did some things, but their focus was well and truly away from those areas. Their MPs often treated such areas and the concerns of the residents with contempt. And why shouldn't they? After all, who else were the people of Mansfield or Hartlepool going to vote for?
The things you mention 'health, education, social mobility' were welcome when they happened, but did f'all to address the structural issues that these areas had. That's what needs addressing, and why 'levelling up' was - and could still be - a powerful policy for either party.
She had impressive internet skills.
Some of the northern, Welsh, Scottish and rural towns are very different, with large areas of relative poverty, and very poor transport links, even inside the town, yet alone to other towns. These towns face many problems London will never have.
The problem I have is that the Tory approach at present is to attack and destroy London and then just do nothing for the North instead (cutting HS2 etc)
But...
All that dragging the north back up to some basic standards did was highlight how run down some areas are post-industrial. New schools and hospitals, better support services and less grinding poverty. But despite all that so many northern areas are still crapola. With poor jobs and no prospect of that changing.
Which is why the red wall voted for Brexit and then for the Tories - they were told why their areas were still shit (foreign workers) and offered the solution - "take back control" of their lives and their communities.
The bar has been raised very high. Labour need to find a way of injecting not just cash into these areas but basic pride. The reason why the likes of Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen and Nicola Sturgeon are popular is because of what they say not just what they do.
Interesting. In the case of my small town the conversions - which would, I think, need planning permission - are on the fringes in streets which were in any case partly residential - so it just means that the shops peter out a little closer to the core centre. There's been some conversion of shops into things like solicitors' and vets' operations as well and the big Co-op department store (small by city standards) became flats on the upper levels. And one derelict villa converted to shop did get demolished for flats. But on the whole the main shopping area has remained, albeit with a few empty shops and some charity operations. No sense (yet) of what you describe; in fact a derelict area on the main street was redeveloped with relatively high quality council housing.
But it needed to kick on having levelled up the worst of the effects of the Tory era and largely failed to do so.
Edit: he does sometimes refer to 'SNP koolaid' and such things.
Boris knows who his coalition is and is correctly not going to risk leakage to RefUK by imposing another lockdown. Freedom Boris wins as he did in 2019, authoritarian Boris won't.
Boris like Trump now against further restrictions. Starmer Labour even more than Biden for more restrictions
It's not just Labour: one of our ex-MPs, Andrew Lansley, was nearly invisible in the constituency. Some Conservative MPs can also treat their constituents with contempt. In the case of South Cambridgeshire, the damage might lead us to turning to the yellow peril at the next election if Anthony Browne cannot turn things around.
I think what these people are fed up of hearing from Labour is negativity, they want some more passion, some more energy.
I believe Wales is the best example of where Labour has done this and run with it. They are the Welsh Party for many, because they are very pro Wales.
Read the post, I am taking the piss that this will be happening like it does every time. Find a post where I said I want another lockdown....you won't, because I haven't...I have said that there is a extreme push for it from some quarters and I think Boris will give in for January enhanced restrictions (you disagree, which is fine).
In fact I have repeatedly said I am very comfortable about the situation post vaccination and that although I expect all of us to catch COVID at some point, I don't think for the fit and healthy it is anything more to worry about than every other possible disease you could encounter.
I have said before, I do think Labour should be in favour of strong controls on immigration now. I am personally pro FOM but it's clear the country is not and we've left the EU now. Is that me disrespecting my principles, I don't know
The real issue post 2008 was simple - austerity. The coalition believed that money wasn't available and didn't invest nationally. The largely Labour councils in these areas basically didn't ever try and just said "blame the Tories". So people have voted for the party who have largely been responsible for the lack of investment having become utterly fed up with lazy local and regional Labour people making excuses. But as the Tories are failing miserably delivering on their "unicorns for all" promised they will struggle to hold many of them.
During WWII, a farmer was selling "rabbit pies" at a very reasonable price.
"How come your rabbit pies are so cheap?"
"To be honest, I mix in a little horse meat."
"How much?"
"Half-and-half, 50-50 ... one rabbit, one horse"
Considering the thread as a whole: it has been rather fractious. I do wonder if some of us are suffering from hangovers. Anyway, had a nice black pudding and egg roll for lunch after a successful experiment with Itsu gyoza in soup, so back to my research paper now.
And then of course Covid struck which is basically an insoluble problem.
Labour needs to be unapologetically pro proper social democracy
We do need good public transport which means more than a few extra buses on already crowded roads
You should be able to build phone masts wherever you need them. Let's get to 100% geographic coverage.
FTTP for all, USO like there is for copper.
Good to see the government has declined restrictions again, that probably puts any chance of them into the first week of January by which time we'll know for sure what the non-incidental admissions rate is for Omicron.
@eek tentatively the move to Switzerland is still on, we'll just ship everything. Though my wife is expressing a lot of doubt at the moment, I half expected it to happen because she's very much a Londoner now and has idealised what life in Switzerland is like because of her childhood rather than what it would be like for us.
Anyway, next stop Spider-Man!
or would you prefer that.
Remember Dundee is one of the biggest areas for game development in Europe, yet because that is the only industry there you complain about the town centre being boarded up as people head towards Edinburgh to shop and for entertainment.
I’m currently reading “‘Rationality” by Steven Pinker, who points out that there are fewer people on Earth living in poverty now than has ever been the case, and that Western campaign groups have tried their best to redefine the team to mean inequality.
So lets have an EDF or a Deutsche Bahn. Commercially run with actual industry leaders making them work, but able to borrow at government rates. And actually invest in the things we need which all pay back a return on that investment. Its called capitalism, but when its being done for national strategic reasons there has to be a state framework as well.
Even the academic who coined the "relative poverty" metric says it has been abused and was never designed to be used in the way Gordon Brown took it and now become normalised. It the equivalent of the Wuhan report use of the term "mild", it was meant to define COVID as a mild disease, it was a way to delineate from those being hospitalised.
The local council did all kinds of stupid stuff - like refusing planning permission for conversion of pubs. So we have a number of pubs which are now homes (can't stop that) but unconverted. Their other special is demanding retail in new developments. Apart from the fact that the new developments already constructed have empty retail below them......
The "local shops" debate comes down to - "What are these Locale Olde Shoppes selling? And to whom?"
The problem with education is that the rates of illiteracy and/or innumeracy barely change over the years. After a few lacklustre and failed attempts at helping those falling behind, New Labour massive concentrated on the top ends of education - hence the stupid 50% uni target. Whereas the country's real issues with education are at the bottom end. But that is much more intractable and generates fewer positive headlines.
I'd vote for a party that really talked about this issue and tried to address it. Functional illiteracy and innumeracy is a national scandal and a personal tragedy for those people.
Also without spoilers would anyone who's seen the new Spider-Man movie say its suitable for those who haven't seen any of this generation of MCU/Spider-Man movies?
I'd like to see it at the cinema, but my wife hasn't seen any of the movies since the Garfield Amazing Spiderman generation of films, before we had kids. She's not really into comic movies, but would go with me before we had kids, since kids we've rarely gone to the cinema apart from kid films.
Darlington was particularly badly effected, I had one meeting where the council begged me to turn the school into the academy as they needed the £25k they got from the application to cover some costs at another school.
For a lot of North East councils the budget is now social care and legal minimum requirements for everything else - as that's all that is left once Osbourne stole the council tax transfers.
In my pension, in shares, in some physical tangible assets, in other things.
But this money I invest comes from reducing my current consumption.
Are the people who want more 'investment' willing to do that ?
And if so what current consumption would they be willing to reduce ?
I wouldn't show the previous films to my seven year-old though - and I do let him watch some fairly advanced things at times (he loves Father Brown and Johnathon Creek).
Cancer, heart problems, diabetes and Covid that requires hospitalisation etc can all be serious diseases.
If you need a week or two of bed rest to get better from a virus then surely that is "mild" even if you feel pretty rotten for that week or two?
If you want the north to be as productive as the south (and productivity = tax revenue) you need to make up for 20 years of investment that was made down south and not spent up north due to dodgy economic models used by the Treasury.
We currently have pretty much full employment and that is pushing up wages (good) and inflation (bad). Our deficit is also causing inflation as is the printing of money (although weirdly slowly). Not all of that employment demand is in the same places people live or can afford to live and that is a problem but we already have excess demand (as shown by our trade deficit) and are selling our future companies and assets to pay for it.
The room for manoeuvre for the government is disappointingly small but what room there is should be focused on those areas where there is surplus labour and structural deficiencies that discourage inward investment such as transport. I support the levelling up agenda on this basis and Dundee could certainly benefit from it but if we were looking for a starting point for a Keynesian boost it wouldn't be here or anywhere near it.
I'm not sure this logic leads to investing in the North being a good idea. Unfortunately.
One mid-credit and one post-credit?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/nov/20/harrypotter1 has an overview from Mark Kermode
The BBFC will have a comment regarding why the movie is a 12A but personally I wouldn't be taking anyone under about 9 to a 12A film.
We'd had decades of Labour politicians babbling about 'Fatcha shut the mines and factories' but when it came down to it Labour chose to bail out London bankers while letting the mines and factories close.
If people in the North are not as productive as can be, then our core business of the nation isn't operating as it should be, and we should figure out why.
Treasury analysis that says "this part of the country is overheating, so lets spend more money there" is part of the problem that means the core business hasn't been working as it should.
Austerity or even the closure of something like Sure Start shows the issue, to restart it you end up having to spend all the start up costs a second time round.
Stop start investment is a crap idea but it does seem to be how the Treasury does things rather than seeding a bit of money and seeing what private investment can be encouraged with just a little effort / incentive.
Newer films its harder to know.
This film will not make sense if you've not seen any of the previous Tom Holland films Spidey films, including the MCU films in which he features.
It literally picks up seconds after the end of Far From Home.
There's no shortage of bad investments which lose money rather than increase it.
The idea that all 'investment' is good is not just wrong but also dangerous.
Rather people babbling about 'investment' merely becomes a front for extra spending on wealth consumption, buying votes, subsidising pet projects or in the case of Gordon Brown general derangement.
I suppose you could sell the whole thing to China, or just the people. But that's frowned on these days.
So the question becomes - what can you do to get a better return on the assets?
On the plus side, at least your surname is used a lot in Succession, and the main character is originally from Dundee.
Unfortunately one aspect of Blair's strategy has led to an overblown university sector with now millions being in tens of thousands in debt from their 'investment'.
Do not diss the MCU in my presence, it's like telling me you like eating Hawaiian pizzas whilst watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve on speed to the infinite power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JQLgoWphDc
Kids of 7 are pretty screen literate but I think 5 would be really pushing it.
The contrast of the Goodwins and Applegarths walking away with fortunes while local bank branches shut with their workers getting only statutory redundancy was noticed.
HS2E is a prime example, it adds 10 fast trains an hour down to London from Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Leeds and Sheffield.
It also adds 24 additional slow trains down the existing ECML and midland mainline routes which can be used for local commuter services or freight.
NPR is the same - the route is currently running at (and beyond capacity) so even keeping current services going is a problem (which is why they are being cut next year because hey needs must). The only way to improve things is again to add another 2 lines and if you are doing that you may as well do it properly.
Now you may not think that the investment is justified but we won't even be able to keep current productivity levels unless this investment is made let alone improve upon them.
If people get PCRs on Boxing Day, for what date would the tests be registered? 27th?
I think the numbers are going to be absolutely wild. 200,000 +
So rather than subsidising dependency in the north, regional policy should subsidise enterprise, by cutting taxes, cutting public spending, axing damaging regulations and promoting infrastructure and other business-friendly spending. If that doesn't restore dynamism to the north, nothing will.
But you are right without the infrastructure projects no-one is going to invest in the North. And guess what infrastructure projects have been cut (everything in the North East)..