“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
Perhaps we should restrict the vote to people who work? Seems suitably Dickensian to appeal to the most traditional Conservative. Why should a bright 17-year-old on their first job with life ahead of them be denied a say while a 99-year-old gets to determine their future?
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
The Tories are traditionally more the party of those who inherit and farmers and the landed gentry than just workers and are now the party of pensioners.
Labour used to be the party of the working class but are now the party of the public sector and students.
The Liberals are actually the party which has generally always been the party whose core is based on middle class workers
Don't talk wet. If voting was restricted to working people Labour would win hands down. We are the workers' party.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Human history has tended to show that cities are better at generating wealth than other forms of human settlement. So I think cities are good. Personally I love living in a city, and moved here from a town where I grew up and would never want to live in now (even though it is probably one of the nicest towns in the UK). But my dad made the journey in the opposite direction. We are lucky to have so many options of places to live in. FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
2 years in a row we held our annual corporate shindig in cities outside London (Manchester and Bristol) and were treated to speeches by the (Labour) mayors of those cities.
Both very impressive and compelling speakers. Both spoke about the problems of their cities and their hopes for the future. But Andy Burnham’s speech was peppered with grievances at London and the South. It was all our fault. Marvin Rees didn’t mention London once.
I find Burnham's professional Northerner act rather grating, to be honest. He's never really appealed to me. I think people who criticise the SNP for being anti English or anti London are dead wrong, BTW. They want Scotland to stand on its own two feet, to stop taking London's money and blaming London for its ills and to make its own way in the world. I'd like to see Northern England adopt some of that attitude. Stop talking about London, start focusing on what they can do to fix their own problems. There should be massive decentralisation of power and resources to facilitate this (including to London).
I know some people who do that and others who live in a city and work in a town.
They all travel by car.
This is getting into pure anecdata territory. I live in a town with a railway station. If you divide the number of journeys from the railway station by the population of the town, every resident makes 100 train journeys a year.
Ok: it's not that simple. It's a railhead, people come from further afield. Still, the notion that people in "towns" don't use public transport is glib nonsense.
Nevertheless public transport is relatively more important in cities and especially London than in towns or rural areas.
She still makes the assumption that long term Covid is worse than flu, and as prevalent as now. All her arguments flow from there. I am not sure that’s as nailed on as she suggests.
That said there are plenty of sensible suggestions in the thread and I think she is starting to come to terms with the fact that things have changed. Still too sanctimonious for my liking but that’s a matter of taste.
Her final conclusion basically amounts to saying that we shouldn't miss the opportunity to use covid as an excuse to implement a socialist utopia.
She still makes the assumption that long term Covid is worse than flu, and as prevalent as now. All her arguments flow from there. I am not sure that’s as nailed on as she suggests.
That said there are plenty of sensible suggestions in the thread and I think she is starting to come to terms with the fact that things have changed. Still too sanctimonious for my liking but that’s a matter of taste.
Yep, the implication that Covid will gradually erode the health of the entire population through repeated infection - i.e. implying that the illness will never get any milder and population immunity will never get any stronger - unless we implement a whole raft of measures to mitigate it seems somewhat far-fetched.
That said, many of the specific mitigations seem perfectly sensible, although she can't quite bring herself to stop threatening us all with the return of the dreaded face gags just yet, alas.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Helping to keep wages low and property prices high.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
The productivity thing is actually fairly easy to explain when you take a historical example in hand - namely that a key reason the Industrial Revolution gained momentum was that Labour (at the time) was relatively expensive and so investing in machinery was a rational decision. If Labour had been cheaper, there is a question whether it would have taken place as it did and when it did.
It’s the same today. Remember those farmers complaining that, if we left the EU, we wouldn’t be able to get produce to the shops? Guess what - their main concern was that they would be deprived of cheap Labour and so would have to invest in technology, as the Dutch did. Once it was clear we were leaving the EU, guess what - the farmers became less vocal because they were forced to adapt as opposed to relying on a quick and easy solution of cheap Labour that could be exploited.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Human history has tended to show that cities are better at generating wealth than other forms of human settlement. So I think cities are good. Personally I love living in a city, and moved here from a town where I grew up and would never want to live in now (even though it is probably one of the nicest towns in the UK). But my dad made the journey in the opposite direction. We are lucky to have so many options of places to live in. FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
2 years in a row we held our annual corporate shindig in cities outside London (Manchester and Bristol) and were treated to speeches by the (Labour) mayors of those cities.
Both very impressive and compelling speakers. Both spoke about the problems of their cities and their hopes for the future. But Andy Burnham’s speech was peppered with grievances at London and the South. It was all our fault. Marvin Rees didn’t mention London once.
I find Burnham's professional Northerner act rather grating, to be honest. He's never really appealed to me. I think people who criticise the SNP for being anti English or anti London are dead wrong, BTW. They want Scotland to stand on its own two feet, to stop taking London's money and blaming London for its ills and to make its own way in the world. I'd like to see Northern England adopt some of that attitude. Stop talking about London, start focusing on what they can do to fix their own problems. There should be massive decentralisation of power and resources to facilitate this (including to London).
The success of Manchester (which can be debated) is due to the City Council, which I think has done a very good job generally over the past two to three decades. I’d agree with you on Burnham - he hijacks the success of Manchester for his own agenda and adds very little
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
Which isn’t that surprising because we are crap at educating people outside of the historic good at academic subjects, go to uni get a job.
If you aren’t academic at age 16 no one has a clue as to how to educate them - so we often don’t.
Heck even at 18, schools say go to uni and ignore the very well paid degree apprenticeship which can give you both a degree and £25,000+ a year.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Human history has tended to show that cities are better at generating wealth than other forms of human settlement. So I think cities are good. Personally I love living in a city, and moved here from a town where I grew up and would never want to live in now (even though it is probably one of the nicest towns in the UK). But my dad made the journey in the opposite direction. We are lucky to have so many options of places to live in. FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
2 years in a row we held our annual corporate shindig in cities outside London (Manchester and Bristol) and were treated to speeches by the (Labour) mayors of those cities.
Both very impressive and compelling speakers. Both spoke about the problems of their cities and their hopes for the future. But Andy Burnham’s speech was peppered with grievances at London and the South. It was all our fault. Marvin Rees didn’t mention London once.
I find Burnham's professional Northerner act rather grating, to be honest. He's never really appealed to me. I think people who criticise the SNP for being anti English or anti London are dead wrong, BTW. They want Scotland to stand on its own two feet, to stop taking London's money and blaming London for its ills and to make its own way in the world. I'd like to see Northern England adopt some of that attitude. Stop talking about London, start focusing on what they can do to fix their own problems. There should be massive decentralisation of power and resources to facilitate this (including to London).
The success of Manchester (which can be debated) is due to the City Council, which I think has done a very good job generally over the past two to three decades. I’d agree with you on Burnham - he hijacks the success of Manchester for his own agenda and adds very little
If Starmer fails to win a majority though and make big enough inroads into the redwall then Burnham would be ideally placed to do so as heir apparent
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
I asked here before 2010 how is the UK to compete against other countries when they're as intelligent and educated as we are but willing to work harder for lower pay and under fewer restrictions.
As to UK governments purchasing choices I remember the London Olympics souvenir tat all having 'Made in China' on it - a captive market and still they didn't think of having it made in this country.
Yet we currently have full employment in areas which haven't had it since the early 1970s or perhaps even earlier.
Perhaps we should restrict the vote to people who work? Seems suitably Dickensian to appeal to the most traditional Conservative. Why should a bright 17-year-old on their first job with life ahead of them be denied a say while a 99-year-old gets to determine their future?
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
The Tories are traditionally more the party of those who inherit and farmers and the landed gentry than just workers and are now the party of pensioners.
Labour used to be the party of the working class but are now the party of the public sector and students.
The Liberals are actually the party which has generally always been the party whose core is based on middle class workers
Don't talk wet. If voting was restricted to working people Labour would win hands down. We are the workers' party.
Pensioners were also workers, they paid taxes all their working lives.
She still makes the assumption that long term Covid is worse than flu, and as prevalent as now. All her arguments flow from there. I am not sure that’s as nailed on as she suggests.
That said there are plenty of sensible suggestions in the thread and I think she is starting to come to terms with the fact that things have changed. Still too sanctimonious for my liking but that’s a matter of taste.
Covid I'd worse than the Flu. So far this year (and we are only 6 weeks in) it has killed more than a bad flu year.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
But Germany has a stagnant population, despite the immigration. The uk population is up almost 15% since 2000. So it’s not really a fair comparator.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
This has been a problem since the 1870s or before, I recall from my economic history lectures. I actually think the UK's problems come down to three things: the economy is run in a highly exploitative way by people who don't give a shit about the rest of the population; and they're incompetent; and the rest of us let them get away with it.
The Express seems to have a different take on The Truss' day out than everyone else.
Tickle me Sickle. Truss excellent hair style has held out valiantly today. Keep the colour. Forget about Thatch just be yourself Liz - the Auburn Lady.
But naughty Financial Times have placed a cruel picture of her on their cover. 👿
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
I’ve written off the 2020s.
The government won’t change until 2024 and even then it’s not clear yet that Labour understand the full and disturbing nature of the challenge. It’s the 1970s redux, but with no EEC or Thatcher* on the horizon.
A lot of my friends have, like me, now left London for opportunities elsewhere.
*I know you would violently disagree with me on Thatcher.
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
Nobody ever walks up my street at 3am on their mobile!
Agree with all of that. Also, quiet county towns have their drawbacks. I had to move from a flat in Haslemere because the grumpy bloke on the next floor complained every time I watched TV (quietly) or made a telephone call after 10pm ("I could hear you talking again - don't you have any consideration?"). He was the tenant coordinator for the posh nursing home converted into flats, and saw his function rather like those Soviet floor matrons who used to keep an eye on tenants to make sure they were behaving.
Never had that trouble when I lived in Holloway...
My neighbour was listening to Iron Maiden until 2am last night. Then my wife took pity, and told me to turn it down.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
Liverpool's big problem is that it is a dead-end. Literally.
Do not get me wrong - it is a lovely city and much nicer than Manchester, but once you reach Liverpool you are snugged in between the Mersey and the Irish Sea. The railway stops at Lime St. The motorway network goes much closer to Manchester than Liverpool.
If you want good motorway access, a large international airport and north/south and east-west railways then you base yourself in Manchester, not Liverpool
The railway does NOT stop at Lime Street! There are trains as far as Southport, West Kirby, New Brighton, and Chester!
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
Liverpool's big problem is that it is a dead-end. Literally.
Do not get me wrong - it is a lovely city and much nicer than Manchester, but once you reach Liverpool you are snugged in between the Mersey and the Irish Sea. The railway stops at Lime St. The motorway network goes much closer to Manchester than Liverpool.
If you want good motorway access, a large international airport and north/south and east-west railways then you base yourself in Manchester, not Liverpool
The railway does NOT stop at Lime Street! There are trains as far as Southport, West Kirby, New Brighton, and Chester!
Doesn’t the WCML continue up to Carlisle and Glasgow?
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
I asked here before 2010 how is the UK to compete against other countries when they're as intelligent and educated as we are but willing to work harder for lower pay and under fewer restrictions.
As to UK governments purchasing choices I remember the London Olympics souvenir tat all having 'Made in China' on it - a captive market and still they didn't think of having it made in this country.
Yet we currently have full employment in areas which haven't had it since the early 1970s or perhaps even earlier.
Now did anyone predict that ?
What are the jobs though, what is pay and conditions, compared say to the machinist jobs of car seats made in Dagenham (see where I get it now) the equivalent today is part time B&Q and a cleaning job in evenings to make ends meet, pay the pills, look after the needs of the kids? Do you see what I mean how hollow Boris rantings at PMQ are.
We have had decades of short termist government thinking, not enough investment in education & skills and transforming our economy quickly enough.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
She still makes the assumption that long term Covid is worse than flu, and as prevalent as now. All her arguments flow from there. I am not sure that’s as nailed on as she suggests.
That said there are plenty of sensible suggestions in the thread and I think she is starting to come to terms with the fact that things have changed. Still too sanctimonious for my liking but that’s a matter of taste.
Covid I'd worse than the Flu. So far this year (and we are only 6 weeks in) it has killed more than a bad flu year.
So who is it killing.
I look at the covid figures on news in recent Omicron weeks and think it was marked down they had it as they were tested, but they were in for something else killing them. Is omicron killing in noticeable numbers?
These backlogs worry me now. People are going to die that could have been saved if there wasn’t back logs, by that I mean under 50s too. 😕
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
Nobody ever walks up my street at 3am on their mobile!
Agree with all of that. Also, quiet county towns have their drawbacks. I had to move from a flat in Haslemere because the grumpy bloke on the next floor complained every time I watched TV (quietly) or made a telephone call after 10pm ("I could hear you talking again - don't you have any consideration?"). He was the tenant coordinator for the posh nursing home converted into flats, and saw his function rather like those Soviet floor matrons who used to keep an eye on tenants to make sure they were behaving.
Never had that trouble when I lived in Holloway...
I did not have many problems in my flat in Epping, a small market town. Generally the other residents are friendly.
Having said that most flat owners tend to be younger and live in inner cities. They move to market towns and outer suburbs to buy houses rather than flats as they start a family
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Oh ok. Agglomeration effects. In that case, skills + infrastructure + devolution.
But companies still need a market to export into. We can already see failing export performance and as noted above that has its own, insidious effect on productivity.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
Just as long as they're satisfied with their living space...
2 LD gains in Somerset West and Taunton and Wealden.
Don't know what's happening in Eastleigh.
Some party’s about to score a hat trick. Winning here!
Knowing that Eastleigh Borough Council is well known as one of a few LD controlled councils I was a little surprised to see they aren't even competitive in the parliamentary seat named Eastleigh, though they came very close in Winchester.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
I asked here before 2010 how is the UK to compete against other countries when they're as intelligent and educated as we are but willing to work harder for lower pay and under fewer restrictions.
As to UK governments purchasing choices I remember the London Olympics souvenir tat all having 'Made in China' on it - a captive market and still they didn't think of having it made in this country.
Yet we currently have full employment in areas which haven't had it since the early 1970s or perhaps even earlier.
Now did anyone predict that ?
What are the jobs though, what is pay and conditions, compared say to the machinist jobs of car seats made in Dagenham (see where I get it now) the equivalent today is part time B&Q and a cleaning job in evenings to make ends meet, pay the pills, look after the needs of the kids? Do you see what I mean how hollow Boris rantings at PMQ are.
We have had decades of short termist government thinking, not enough investment in education & skills and transforming our economy quickly enough.
I get your point about workers in and around London and the cost of living there - how they are supposed to survive, let alone prosper, is beyond me.
But its not easy recruiting workers in manufacturing in Yorkshire currently or in any other sector judging by the number of vacancies there seems to be.
And given the amount of houses and industrial units being built there's plenty of both money and predicted demand about.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
Low rates of home ownership seems to suit Germany pretty well. I also like the fact that credit cards are very unpopular there because, shock horror, people don't like the idea of getting into debt, even for a short time. Maybe we could learn something from that.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Oh ok. Agglomeration effects. In that case, skills + infrastructure + devolution.
But companies still need a market to export into. We can already see failing export performance and as noted above that has its own, insidious effect on productivity.
A similar effect can now be seen in FDI.
The UK is the sixth biggest exporter globally and over 60% of services exports go outside Europe. We're far from a minnow. I expect your pessimistic view to be confounded.
2 LD gains in Somerset West and Taunton and Wealden.
Don't know what's happening in Eastleigh.
Some party’s about to score a hat trick. Winning here!
Knowing that Eastleigh Borough Council is well known as one of a few LD controlled councils I was a little surprised to see they aren't even competitive in the parliamentary seat named Eastleigh, though they came very close in Winchester.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
Low rates of home ownership seems to suit Germany pretty well. I also like the fact that credit cards are very unpopular there because, shock horror, people don't like the idea of getting into debt, even for a short time. Maybe we could learn something from that.
We used to be reminded by @rcs1000 that lower consumption / higher household savings meant better export performance.
Tough time to do it though, given the already-baked-in decline in living standards.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
That's easy. They are popular destinations for British emigrants, so their success is a product of our brain drain.
Jokes aside, those countries have had mostly high skill immigrants in recent decades. The exception is the US, which has had flat average incomes for the middle class incomes for 30 years.
I know some people who do that and others who live in a city and work in a town.
They all travel by car.
This is getting into pure anecdata territory. I live in a town with a railway station. If you divide the number of journeys from the railway station by the population of the town, every resident makes 100 train journeys a year.
Ok: it's not that simple. It's a railhead, people come from further afield. Still, the notion that people in "towns" don't use public transport is glib nonsense.
I've just run the numbers for my local station. 20 journeys per resident per year.
Say all the users are commuters, working 260 days annually - two journeys a day... 520 annual each. That's a whopping 1/26th of the population commuting by train. And actually it's a bit less than that, as there will be other travel, including people coming into town to work not in the population figures.
This is in a town with regular trains to the nearest city centre only an hour away.
I'd imagine that the bus usage figures are even lower.
Begin to see why I'm suggesting that spunking cash on busses and trains is pretty irrelevant to your average Northerner...
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
2 LD gains in Somerset West and Taunton and Wealden.
Don't know what's happening in Eastleigh.
Some party’s about to score a hat trick. Winning here!
Knowing that Eastleigh Borough Council is well known as one of a few LD controlled councils I was a little surprised to see they aren't even competitive in the parliamentary seat named Eastleigh, though they came very close in Winchester.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"being inherited by younger generations"... you mean people in their 50s.
Also help with deposits in their 30s but it stays in the family over the decades
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
... because a single country is a single market! People go where the jobs are. For example banking jobs (I mean the back office databasey stuff) happens in London, Edinburgh, Manchester. You're probably not in that line of work and living in Cornwall or Orkney. If you hinder people from moving from where they live, you harm those industries because it's harder to build that concentration of skills. I mean, it obviously a part of (your words) "having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place". You need people to be able to move in order to get clusters.
The problem isn't about access to supply of labour so much as generation of demand for labour in the places that you want it (and I don't mean levelling up regionally but attracting economic activity to the UK in the first place). You can think of it as an emigration problem rather than an immigration problem: we should aim to create a country that people don't want to leave for economic reasons.
2 LD gains in Somerset West and Taunton and Wealden.
Don't know what's happening in Eastleigh.
Some party’s about to score a hat trick. Winning here!
Knowing that Eastleigh Borough Council is well known as one of a few LD controlled councils I was a little surprised to see they aren't even competitive in the parliamentary seat named Eastleigh, though they came very close in Winchester.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"younger generations" meaning people in their 50s and 60s?
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
... because a single country is a single market! People go where the jobs are. For example banking jobs (I mean the back office databasey stuff) happens in London, Edinburgh, Manchester. You're probably not in that line of work and living in Cornwall or Orkney. If you hinder people from moving from where they live, you harm those industries because it's harder to build that concentration of skills. I mean, it obviously a part of (your words) "having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place". You need people to be able to move in order to get clusters.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"being inherited by younger generations"... you mean people in their 50s.
Also help with deposits in their 30s but it stays in the family over the decades
You don't think an economy where you didn't need to rely on the bank of mum and dad would be better? You know, rewarding talent and hard work instead of rewarding having rich parents?
What am I saying, of course you don't think that. It's all Faith, Tsar and Fatherland with you.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"younger generations" meaning people in their 50s and 60s?
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"being inherited by younger generations"... you mean people in their 50s.
Also help with deposits in their 30s but it stays in the family over the decades
You don't think an economy where you didn't need to rely on the bank of mum and dad would be better? You know, rewarding talent and hard work instead of rewarding having rich parents?
What am I saying, of course you don't think that. It's all Faith, Tsar and Fatherland with you.
As I pointed out Germany has even lower levels of home ownership than we do so is hardly the answer on that.
However, I am a Tory and a Conservative not a Liberal or a Socialist, I believe in inherited wealth.
I also believe in protecting our green spaces as a Conservative. If we need new homes they should be mainly targeted affordable homes on brownfield sites
Scrapping restrictions and bringing into pine with flu is one thing, but with 1500 a week dying of COVID* this seems crass.
Given that everything Boris does to try and help himself is spectacularly inappropriate and only digs the hole deeper at the moment, what price he crows about this just as HMQ tests positive?
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"younger generations" meaning people in their 50s and 60s?
Ah, damn, I have to wait that long?
I'm in my early 40s. I hope to be waiting until at least my 50s...
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
... because a single country is a single market! People go where the jobs are. For example banking jobs (I mean the back office databasey stuff) happens in London, Edinburgh, Manchester. You're probably not in that line of work and living in Cornwall or Orkney. If you hinder people from moving from where they live, you harm those industries because it's harder to build that concentration of skills. I mean, it obviously a part of (your words) "having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place". You need people to be able to move in order to get clusters.
The problem isn't about access to supply of labour so much as generation of demand for labour in the places that you want it (and I don't mean levelling up regionally but attracting economic activity to the UK in the first place). You can think of it as an emigration problem rather than an immigration problem: we should aim to create a country that people don't want to leave for economic reasons.
"generation of demand for labour in the places that you want it"? I don't really know what you mean by this, but it sounds a little too much like central planning for my tastes. Why not let the market decide?
I didn't have you down as a hardline Thatcherite and I'm not advocating a solution but just reframing the problem.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
You say that as if it’s a bad thing! 🙂
It is if you believe in the security and wealth property ownership brings, as I do.
Isn’t that precisely the approach that has screwed up the UK, locking wealth in the oldies property and screwing over the younger generations?
No, as most of that wealth ends up being inherited by younger generations.
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
"being inherited by younger generations"... you mean people in their 50s.
Also help with deposits in their 30s but it stays in the family over the decades
You don't think an economy where you didn't need to rely on the bank of mum and dad would be better? You know, rewarding talent and hard work instead of rewarding having rich parents?
What am I saying, of course you don't think that. It's all Faith, Tsar and Fatherland with you.
As I pointed out Germany has even lower levels of home ownership than we do so is hardly the answer on that.
However, I am a Tory and a Conservative not a Liberal or a Socialist, I believe in inherited wealth.
I also believe in protecting our green spaces as a Conservative. If we need new homes they should be mainly targeted affordable homes on brownfield sites
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Remind me again how the UK performed on labour force participation rates over the past few years.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
To what extent is the supposed education failure a function of losing too many of our best people? The UK has a larger absolute number of people living abroad than the US or Germany, and the emigration rate is comparable to some former eastern bloc countries like Slovakia.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
The productivity thing is actually fairly easy to explain when you take a historical example in hand - namely that a key reason the Industrial Revolution gained momentum was that Labour (at the time) was relatively expensive and so investing in machinery was a rational decision. If Labour had been cheaper, there is a question whether it would have taken place as it did and when it did.
It’s the same today. Remember those farmers complaining that, if we left the EU, we wouldn’t be able to get produce to the shops? Guess what - their main concern was that they would be deprived of cheap Labour and so would have to invest in technology, as the Dutch did. Once it was clear we were leaving the EU, guess what - the farmers became less vocal because they were forced to adapt as opposed to relying on a quick and easy solution of cheap Labour that could be exploited.
I don't think that's true at all: the very long-term data on wages shows that they were falling in the fifty or hundred years prior to the industrial revolution, as people found themselves forced off the land by the agricultural revolution.
Essentially the industrial revolution was powered by the fact that there was lots of labour that could be tapped by factories.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
“Those studies”. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Imagine if you rerun the UK economy from the 'Cool Britannia' years but with something more like a skilled-worker visa system. The overall productivity gain would from immigration would probably have been greater, because it wouldn't have been diluted by inherently less productive work, and it would have created less pressure on housing.
I’m very skeptical, frankly.
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
Germany has about the lowest home ownership level in Europe
That's because they have great availability of high quality rental homes.
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
Manchester University might be just down the road but Liverpool University is even closer, as are Liverpool Hope and Liverpool John Moores.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
That's a different point, surely.
Some people will prefer lots of space and not many people, and other people will prefer crowded and dirty. Those preferences will affect all kinds of things, including what kinds of businesses exist where, and resulting wage levels.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
To what extent is the supposed education failure a function of losing too many of our best people? The UK has a larger absolute number of people living abroad than the US or Germany, and the emigration rate is comparable to some former eastern bloc countries like Slovakia.
The problem of education in the UK is not with the high skilled and the academic. People like you and me, got great educations, at good Universities, and then went on to high paying careers.
The problem is with the 60% of people who don't (or shouldn't) go onto university. We do a very poor job of training people up to lead productive lives, something that secondary moderns (for example) were particularly bad at.
The German or Swiss systems do amazing jobs of making sure that everyone has skills that are useful. And the consequence of this has been that - despite sky high wages in those countries - they didn't end up importing Polish plumbers, because they had their own.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
That's a different point, surely.
Some people will prefer lots of space and not many people, and other people will prefer crowded and dirty. Those preferences will affect all kinds of things, including what kinds of businesses exist where, and resulting wage levels.
The point is just that, in itself, being open to a large labour pool is meaningless and won't miraculously generate wealth on its own.
Immigration flat-earthers need to explain the economic success of such basket cases as
Switzerland Austria Germany Sweden Ireland Canada Australia USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I’ve covered that we don’t train our workforce up. Which is remarkable given how much money should be available given the 0.5% apprenticeship levy…
Yes. Well we agree, and Max’s anecdote is telling.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
One of the most worrying things for me in terms of Britain's economic future is that becoming an exporter is a key way that firms boost their productivity, and thanks to Brexit it's much harder for firms to take that step now. I really worry we are going to get trapped into a low productivity low wage economy. Real wages are probably going to fall by at least 2% this year.
Britain still has a sustainable competitive advantage in services in an English-dominated global economy. We just need to focus on network effects so that we become a globally important hub in more sectors.
You mean network effects like leaving the single market? That’s pretty much the opposite of a network effect.
No, network effects from having clusters of people with complementary skills in the same place. The single market is irrelevant for that.
Except free movement of labour is part of the single market. The harder it is for people with complementary skills to gather, the more you risk those happy outcomes.
Free movement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, otherwise how can you explain regional disparities within countries?
That's a different point, surely.
Some people will prefer lots of space and not many people, and other people will prefer crowded and dirty. Those preferences will affect all kinds of things, including what kinds of businesses exist where, and resulting wage levels.
The point is just that, in itself, being open to a large labour pool is meaningless and won't miraculously generate wealth on its own.
If a country had a population of one, then it would struggle to generate any wealth as there would be no ability to specialise.
Now, I can see the benefits diminishing as you grow, such that a 1bn labour market is little better than a 10m ones, but I don't think there is zero impact from size of labour pool.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Remind me again how the UK performed on labour force participation rates over the past few years.
The last two years had a teeny weeny issue called "Covid", which means that I wouldn't personally choose to pay much attention to it.
Surely we can agree that the economy growing 1.5% p/a because the total population has grown by 2% is worse than the economy stagnating because the total population is stagnating?
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
To what extent is the supposed education failure a function of losing too many of our best people? The UK has a larger absolute number of people living abroad than the US or Germany, and the emigration rate is comparable to some former eastern bloc countries like Slovakia.
The problem of education in the UK is not with the high skilled and the academic. People like you and me, got great educations, at good Universities, and then went on to high paying careers.
The problem is with the 60% of people who don't (or shouldn't) go onto university. We do a very poor job of training people up to lead productive lives, something that secondary moderns (for example) were particularly bad at.
The German or Swiss systems do amazing jobs of making sure that everyone has skills that are useful. And the consequence of this has been that - despite sky high wages in those countries - they didn't end up importing Polish plumbers, because they had their own.
I do completely agree with that.
I'm thinking more of the relative failure to create new globally successful businesses and the employment that goes with them. At the time the single market was first created, it was diagnosed as a problem of scale, and yet since then, Europe has fallen further behind on that measure.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
And you'll also find that some foreigners turn up to claim the benefits.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Remind me again how the UK performed on labour force participation rates over the past few years.
The last two years had a teeny weeny issue called "Covid", which means that I wouldn't personally choose to pay much attention to it.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Remind me again how the UK performed on labour force participation rates over the past few years.
The last two years had a teeny weeny issue called "Covid", which means that I wouldn't personally choose to pay much attention to it.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
Well sometimes we argue over the cricket.
And pizza. And Radiohead. But mostly Brexit.
To go back to Levelling Up, and what is meant by it. For decades, not just up North in Red Wall but everywhere UK communities have been ravaged by globalisation. By that I mean, taking Dagenham as an example, there was a car plant with 40K workers on good pay and now it’s 4K. Where that used to be a decent wage for a professional job, what do people do for work there now? Do they see the community get delapitated around them? Kids can’t get on property ladder, benefits, food banks.
Blair, New Labour, what did they really do about it? A couple of lines in Blair speeches about embracing opportunities of globalisation, warmly applauded in the conference hall. What did Cameron and Osborne do about globalisation? these ravaged communities were ignored for too long. And it was politically stupid to do that.
If someone with Charisma promises a magic wand to reverse all that globalisation, why not vote for it, what have you got to lose? The people voting for £350M extra a week into the NHS and the reversal of three generations of decline in their community are not idiots, they only done the right thing, wishing in their bedtime prayers for the right thing.
How exactly did globalisation ravage UK? Take that Dagenham car plant as example. The world got smaller, container ships bigger, we can’t compete here in UK with similar products made eight times cheaper other side of Asia, with wages eight times cheaper. When the UK government builds something, it doesn’t even use British Steel, it gets cheaper steel from somewhere else.
What is the promised magic wand, that not only slows or stops it reverses all this? The problem for the Conservatives now, they’ve promised it, they’ve promised waves of magic wand, they haven’t revealed it, so we don’t know if they got one.
There is no magic wand - that wand only comes via increased productivity and productivity is one of this countries biggest weaknesses.
However, that is not to say the people who voted for Brexit were idiots, they weren’t as immigration has been used to avoid investment for decades, where other countries spend £10m on machinery, we just got a few people to do another shift on the lowest wage management could get away with paying. And a lot of Eastern Europeans were helping to keep the wages of those jobs as low as possible by provide an amble supply of cheap workers.
Except that mostly, immigration increased productivity, as it was v largely better skilled.
But we now know that the denominator in those studies was wrong, and in any case, importing people might help the Treasury but it doesn't help the people who are being left behind.
Immigration is a response to the twin failures of education and benefits. If you take an uneducated workforce, and then pay them not to work, you will find that foreigners turn up to do the jobs.
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Remind me again how the UK performed on labour force participation rates over the past few years.
The last two years had a teeny weeny issue called "Covid", which means that I wouldn't personally choose to pay much attention to it.
Comments
And Eagles for PM 👍🏻
I think people who criticise the SNP for being anti English or anti London are dead wrong, BTW. They want Scotland to stand on its own two feet, to stop taking London's money and blaming London for its ills and to make its own way in the world. I'd like to see Northern England adopt some of that attitude. Stop talking about London, start focusing on what they can do to fix their own problems. There should be massive decentralisation of power and resources to facilitate this (including to London).
You are just trolling…yourself.
That said, many of the specific mitigations seem perfectly sensible, although she can't quite bring herself to stop threatening us all with the return of the dreaded face gags just yet, alas.
It’s the same today. Remember those farmers complaining that, if we left the EU, we wouldn’t be able to get produce to the shops? Guess what - their main concern was that they would be deprived of cheap Labour and so would have to invest in technology, as the Dutch did. Once it was clear we were leaving the EU, guess what - the farmers became less vocal because they were forced to adapt as opposed to relying on a quick and easy solution of cheap Labour that could be exploited.
The people who are left behind are those in left behind areas which have been starved of investment, infrastructure and skills.
Immigration was the secret sauce that delivered much of the economic growth that *did* take place.
Although it will delay the report from Met on PartyGate by months and months.
If you aren’t academic at age 16 no one has a clue as to how to educate them - so we often don’t.
Heck even at 18, schools say go to uni and ignore the very well paid degree apprenticeship which can give you both a degree and £25,000+ a year.
As to UK governments purchasing choices I remember the London Olympics souvenir tat all having 'Made in China' on it - a captive market and still they didn't think of having it made in this country.
Yet we currently have full employment in areas which haven't had it since the early 1970s or perhaps even earlier.
Now did anyone predict that ?
Plus under Cameron the Tories won workers too
Switzerland
Austria
Germany
Sweden
Ireland
Canada
Australia
USA
All of which have higher immigrants as percentage of resident population numbers…
I think the productivity issues are due to the issues I discussed upthread, and so-called low-productivity immigrants are very much the last rhetorical refuge of Brexit die-hards.
On housing, again I tend to blame the UK’s bizarre planning regime. See Germany for a high immigration / low house prices comparator.
The apprenticeship levy seems to have been ineffectual. I suspect it’s because many UK business are so badly managed they are not sure even what kind of professional development would be productive…
One idea is to set up sector-by-sector regimes, rather than allow free-for-all, even if it sounds a bit dirigiste, it might enforce a better and more focused cross-sectoral learning.
I actually think the UK's problems come down to three things: the economy is run in a highly exploitative way by people who don't give a shit about the rest of the population; and they're incompetent; and the rest of us let them get away with it.
Don't know what's happening in Eastleigh.
But naughty Financial Times have placed a cruel picture of her on their cover. 👿
The government won’t change until 2024 and even then it’s not clear yet that Labour understand the full and disturbing nature of the challenge. It’s the 1970s redux, but with no EEC or Thatcher* on the horizon.
A lot of my friends have, like me, now left London for opportunities elsewhere.
*I know you would violently disagree with me on Thatcher.
We have had decades of short termist government thinking, not enough investment in education & skills and transforming our economy quickly enough.
I look at the covid figures on news in recent Omicron weeks and think it was marked down they had it as they were tested, but they were in for something else killing them. Is omicron killing in noticeable numbers?
These backlogs worry me now. People are going to die that could have been saved if there wasn’t back logs, by that I mean under 50s too. 😕
Having said that most flat owners tend to be younger and live in inner cities. They move to market towns and outer suburbs to buy houses rather than flats as they start a family
In that case, skills + infrastructure + devolution.
But companies still need a market to export into. We can already see failing export performance and as noted above that has its own, insidious effect on productivity.
A similar effect can now be seen in FDI.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
But its not easy recruiting workers in manufacturing in Yorkshire currently or in any other sector judging by the number of vacancies there seems to be.
And given the amount of houses and industrial units being built there's plenty of both money and predicted demand about.
Whether that is sustainable I don't know.
Take that high flying Labour polling 🥊
And take that Boris your fraud 🤺 off with their Johnson
Tough time to do it though, given the already-baked-in decline in living standards.
20 journeys per resident per year.
Say all the users are commuters, working 260 days annually - two journeys a day... 520 annual each. That's a whopping 1/26th of the population commuting by train. And actually it's a bit less than that, as there will be other travel, including people coming into town to work not in the population figures.
This is in a town with regular trains to the nearest city centre only an hour away.
I'd imagine that the bus usage figures are even lower.
Begin to see why I'm suggesting that spunking cash on busses and trains is pretty irrelevant to your average Northerner...
Germany has one of the lowest levels of property ownership in the Western world and in Europe and far fewer assets to inherit and hence also weaker family units and less security. Even Bulgaria and Poland have far higher home ownership levels than Germany.
We can learn from Germany in terms of its high quality apprenticeships and vocational education, not from its low home ownership levels
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2013/02/28/are-we-entering-the-twilight-of-the-leadership-of-dave/
However, I am a Tory and a Conservative not a Liberal or a Socialist, I believe in inherited wealth.
I also believe in protecting our green spaces as a Conservative. If we need new homes they should be mainly targeted affordable homes on brownfield sites
We need to make sure we solve the skills gap, and reform our benefits system, otherwise all we will do is encourage British firms to move abroad.
Essentially the industrial revolution was powered by the fact that there was lots of labour that could be tapped by factories.
Some people will prefer lots of space and not many people, and other people will prefer crowded and dirty. Those preferences will affect all kinds of things, including what kinds of businesses exist where, and resulting wage levels.
The problem is with the 60% of people who don't (or shouldn't) go onto university. We do a very poor job of training people up to lead productive lives, something that secondary moderns (for example) were particularly bad at.
The German or Swiss systems do amazing jobs of making sure that everyone has skills that are useful. And the consequence of this has been that - despite sky high wages in those countries - they didn't end up importing Polish plumbers, because they had their own.
Now, I can see the benefits diminishing as you grow, such that a 1bn labour market is little better than a 10m ones, but I don't think there is zero impact from size of labour pool.
However... it is fair to say that the UK's labour force participation rate was heading in the wrong direction even before Covid.
I'm thinking more of the relative failure to create new globally successful businesses and the employment that goes with them. At the time the single market was first created, it was diagnosed as a problem of scale, and yet since then, Europe has fallen further behind on that measure.
Despite the direction of travel, the UK has one of the highest labour force participation rates in the world.
My point is that you are wrong I think about the the benefits system paying people to stay at home.
Better to say it pays them to go to work in low productivity jobs!
The UK ones are here - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS?locations=GB
And actually look pretty good