“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.
“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.
One would expect that an ageing continent, as with Japan, would fall ever further behind. Demographics is destiny.
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?
Yes, with a caveat.
Don't forget that if the population is stagnating (which given people are living longer means it is ageing), then you have a situation where ever greater proportions of the workers' income is spent on retirees.
“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.
That is another problem with the UK's benefits system: (when we were in the EU) it encouraged people to come and claim.
“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.
One would expect that an ageing continent, as with Japan, would fall ever further behind. Demographics is destiny.
I have seen this zany 1970s film that was a bit like the island with Scarlett Johnanssen but completely different where no one was allowed to grow old they blew them up. Not that I’m suggesting that to solve the problem. 🤭.
It would also solve HYUFD big problem below, people waiting till their 70’s to unlock their inheritance. Blow them up to get the inheritance and then get blown up yourselves.
Who knows what Boris will come up with to survive next week. 💁♀️
“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
You are NOT a Conservative! You voted REMAIN!
so did a good chunk of the current Tory MPs.... Liz Truss, Tom Tuigendhadt, T May being good examples..
“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.
One would expect that an ageing continent, as with Japan, would fall ever further behind. Demographics is destiny.
I have seen this zany 1970s film that was a bit like the island with Scarlett Johnanssen but completely different where no one was allowed to grow old they blew them up. Not that I’m suggesting that to solve the problem. 🤭.
It would also solve HYUFD big problem below, people waiting till their 70’s to unlock their inheritance. Blow them up to get the inheritance and then get blown up yourselves.
Who knows what Boris will come up with to survive next week. 💁♀️
I think the UK has been pretty fortunate with immigration over the years, because we have a wide mix of people from different countries. A diversity of diversity so to speak.
“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.
That data is for 18-24 only. 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!
A working poor living on breadline? Actually a great many households spending a lot of time in work each week, but still needing state help? Is there data to prove that is true?
It would be consequences of many lazy governments thinking of short term survival not long term plan that allows such a problem to develop? Lack of serious thought and investment in skills, training and retraining, and managing the direction the economy is sliding left when to itself?
I think the UK has been pretty fortunate with immigration over the years, because we have a wide mix of people from different countries. A diversity of diversity so to speak.
When I first came to London, going with college friends to different foreign restaurants so often was amazing. London is not really like being in England.
Which is why seeing Ukrainians on TV news is so sad. They don’t have many fabulous foreign restaurants where they are living 😕
x = interest rate y = inflation adjusted house value z= calculated 25 yr monthly mortgage payment
Assumption that mortgage rate = BoE + 1.5%.
Conclusion.
October 1989 was an awful time. Nov 79 wasn't good either. July 2007 was expensive too. Cheapest point for home ownership was October 1977 in terms of real prices. Currently it's cheap but more sensitive to interest rates than in the past, due to higher real values.
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.
And his “always” in respect of the Liberals immediately falls down when you look at the historic bunch of seats they used to hold, almost all of which were marked for having relatively few middle class workers.
“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.
One would expect that an ageing continent, as with Japan, would fall ever further behind. Demographics is destiny.
I have seen this zany 1970s film that was a bit like the island with Scarlett Johnanssen but completely different where no one was allowed to grow old they blew them up. Not that I’m suggesting that to solve the problem. 🤭.
It would also solve HYUFD big problem below, people waiting till their 70’s to unlock their inheritance. Blow them up to get the inheritance and then get blown up yourselves.
Who knows what Boris will come up with to survive next week. 💁♀️
x = interest rate y = inflation adjusted house value z= calculated 25 yr monthly mortgage payment
Assumption that mortgage rate = BoE + 1.5%.
Conclusion.
October 1989 was an awful time. Nov 79 wasn't good either. July 2007 was expensive too. Cheapest point for home ownership was October 1977 in terms of real prices. Currently it's cheap but more sensitive to interest rates than in the past, due to higher real values.
I can't read that graph, but sounds about right. Was the best of recent years in the early teens, and late nineties?
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.
And his “always” in respect of the Liberals immediately falls down when you look at the historic bunch of seats they used to hold, almost all of which were marked for having relatively few middle class workers.
If you looked at the Liberals national voteshare they would always do better with middle class professionals than either pensioners or the working class
Comments
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
Don't forget that if the population is stagnating (which given people are living longer means it is ageing), then you have a situation where ever greater proportions of the workers' income is spent on retirees.
It would also solve HYUFD big problem below, people waiting till their 70’s to unlock their inheritance. Blow them up to get the inheritance and then get blown up yourselves.
Who knows what Boris will come up with to survive next week. 💁♀️
It would be consequences of many lazy governments thinking of short term survival not long term plan that allows such a problem to develop? Lack of serious thought and investment in skills, training and retraining, and managing the direction the economy is sliding left when to itself?
The question is will they use it before the month is out
Which is why seeing Ukrainians on TV news is so sad. They don’t have many fabulous foreign restaurants where they are living 😕
https://rpubs.com/Pulpstar/boe
x = interest rate
y = inflation adjusted house value
z= calculated 25 yr monthly mortgage payment
Assumption that mortgage rate = BoE + 1.5%.
Conclusion.
October 1989 was an awful time.
Nov 79 wasn't good either.
July 2007 was expensive too.
Cheapest point for home ownership was October 1977 in terms of real prices.
Currently it's cheap but more sensitive to interest rates than in the past, due to higher real values.
https://youtu.be/USADM5Gk9Gs