“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
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