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Day 41 of the Truss premiership and some terrible front pages – politicalbetting.com
Day 41 of the Truss premiership and some terrible front pages – politicalbetting.com
It was always going to be a problem for Truss that she only won the support of less than 19% of the parliamentary Conservative Party during the leadership election first round. She was the third choice of MPs
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@stjohn says on the previous thread that the best value bet around at the moment is laying Truss to be PM after the next GE, over at Smarkets.
Ok, no punter likes tying up cash for too long, but he reckons that even if he has to wait two years, he’s going to make a 28% return. There are worse investments at the moment.
He’s theoretically risking his stake, but c’mon, Liz Truss is never going to be PM after the next GE. It is now virtually impossible.
Added benefit (from a Tory perspective): prevents another SNP landslide north of the border (45% of the vote really ought to give apporoximately 45% of legislators, not 90%).
As @OnlyLivingBoy says above: their infamous survival instincts cannot have deserted the Tories altogether? Surely?
For decades PR was just a Lib Dem/SNP pipe dream. Now there are compelling arguments that it is in the narrow partisan interests of both Labour and the Tories too.
A. For Labour, to prevent the Tories ever forming a single-party majority government ever again
B. For Tories, to prevent Canada extinction-level GE.
He fixed it so that the run-off was Rishi-Liz and not Rishi-Penny, in the mistaken belief that members of the Conservative and Unionist Party have an iota of common sense.
Nope. Rishi is damaged goods.
The Oaf is severely damaged goods.
Wallace is a feartie.
Gove is a slimebag.
Braverman would do even worse than Truss.
Gotta be Mordaunt or May, surely?
Knowing Tories, they’ll go for the biggest slimebag. Congratulations Michael!
The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.
In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!
(though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)
2007 Wendy Alexander
2008 Iain Gray
2011 Johan Lamont
2014 Jim Murphy
2015 Kezia Dugdale
2017 Richard Leonard
2021 Anas Sarwar
The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.
Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
VoNC? Can't happen in her first year of office, I don't think.
Enough letters go in to make the 1922 Committee change the rules in that regard? This would require agreement across the party and I can't see that happening (though I'm no expert in the internal mechanisms for this to happen).
LizT jumps before she's pushed? She won't do that; there's always the chance Ukraine will be her Falklands, so why not hang on and hope?
Mass resignations mean she can't form a Government (à la Boris)? Her cabinet is stuffed full of loyalists (one can see why now!) so I can't see that happening.
We can talk about Tory MPs' survival instincts as much as we like but when you're in a room without windows, defenestration is impossible.
It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.
Resignation due to health or family issues.
It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.
Why would she do that though? We've seen very recently how brazenly people will try to hang on in No.10 against all odds... I can't see her gracefully stepping aside, can you?
It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.
Why would she do that though? We've seen very recently how brazenly people will try to hang on in No.10 against all odds... I can't see her gracefully stepping aside, can you?
Sorry, not got the quoting mechanism quite right yet...!!
"Essentially she has over-reached herself."
A straightforward but devastating summary.
ETA ironically, I did need to edit the quoted material to remove a couple of spurious end-blockquote tags.
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1580336815965622274
UK to donate air defence missiles to Ukraine
The UK will donate AMRAAMs compatible with NASAMS, and “Hundreds of additional air defence missiles of other types would also be donated, along with more aerial drones and a further 18 howitzers”
Retailer plans to close 67 full-line stores
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/12/ms-close-quarter-bigger-shops-struggles-rising-costs/ (£££)
This matters because the loss of big-name shops, sometimes called destination stores, was a big factor in red wall seats. Any government interested in self-preservation, let alone levelling up, would do well to look at ways of defending the high street.
Truss back down to 5.3 to go this year on Betfair.
So the scenario is the May scenario. Mrs Brady goes to her, points to the open rebellion and inability to do anything at all from her program, and offers the pearl-handled revolver. For the party ...
Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday.
The crown was specially made for Queen Elizabeth — later the Queen Mother — in 1937. Previously the diamond was mounted in the crowns of Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and Queen Mary, wife of George V.
The Koh-i-Noor was acquired by the East India Company after the Anglo-Sikh Wars and presented to Queen Victoria in 1850. A campaign has sprung up in India urging Britain to return it, although it is also claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A source told the Daily Mail: “There are serious political sensitivities and significant nervousness.”
According to The Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party of Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, said: “The coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Koh-i-Noor brings back painful memories of the colonial past.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-bank-holiday-king-coronation-downing-street-nz92p7nv9
Elton John: Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding
For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.
Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.
But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.
We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.
That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
When in office we public get lumbered with whoever the party chooses, and if those doing the choosing become irresponsible in doing so, they deserve to be punished for it. Because we certainly are being.
I don't think the MPs can get away with crowning Rishi when he just lost with the membership. Penny would have likely beaten Rishi with membership. Joint ticket for stability and for about the best chance of retaining the Tory MPs' seats.
Penny is personable in a way that Truss never was. She can't win the next general election but she can limit the losses.
I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
Just one of many history lessons that should be taught to ALL British school children but which never is:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49404024
The British Empire benign? Bollocks.
Of course it should be noted that the East India Company did eventually fall foul of the British Government who decided that they had gone all Colonel Kurz on them.
From the perspective of the real global poor, this is of course good news, because they are being slowly levelled with us.
There have been prior periods in history when power and wealth has aggregated towards a small elite, and the eventual outcome has tended to be political turbulence, often of a violent nature.
The ironic circularity is of course that such pressures are behind the origins of communism.
Perhaps what is missing today is any sort of coherent ideology or alternative model (to globalistic capitalism - which has become proto-oligarchic) powerful enough to be both credible and around which modern revolutionaries (and voters) can gather?
The solution, in my view, is some form of stakeholder capitalism. Employees, customers and local communities (ie those with a long term interest in the growth of a business) owning as large a stake in that business as economically possible.
I don’t think it’s government that is the problem, though I agree with other parts of your diagnosis.
Per capita GDP grew in many places, but median income did not. Why the disconnect? We see the issue as widening inequality, which is why there is so much concern about the “1%”. Statistics on the share of income taken by the richest show that inequality has been rising from the early 1980s. It’s an old adage that it is easier to share gains than losses: when everyone’s income was rising, the difference between the richest and the rest seemed a price worth paying.
Across the developed world, people are discontented because the old post War consensus has been broken. We are no longer all getting richer. And worse, we have a situation where a certain segment (the elites, the one percent, etc.) have gotten richer, while many others have gotten poorer. With consumer debt at elevated levels in many places, and the cost of entry into the middle classes – a college degree – both costing more and offering less, we should not be surprised that the stratification in society is resulting in fractures.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20090866/home-sec-snubbed-immigration-reform/
Moderates have accused Suella Braverman of freelancing on immigration policies and running her own leadership campaign inside the HO
Source told The Sun: “It's clear that there is widespread frustration in gov with Suella’s freelancing. She's running a blatant leadership campaign but it’s having a destabilising effect on the gov. She needs to focus on the day job and stop her antics or she won’t last long."
Sounds like he's preparing the ground for a humiliating climbdown.
https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1580440338271203328
To understand our current predicament, we need to first understand where we came from. Growing up in the post war period in the developed world was like winning the lottery: you were a member of the global 1% by accident of birth. The reason the developed world was so well off is that it had learned the secret of manufacturing, and it was where all the capital (in terms of machines that made things) had been deployed.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the developed world exported manufactured products and services, while the developing world (including China) exported raw materials. This relationship was very good for workers in rich economies, as they were the bottleneck in world economic production. The producers of raw materials – say Brazil and China for iron ore, and the Middle East and Nigeria for oil – were poor, and the makers of cars were rich.
This began to change with the emergence of the tiger economies in the late 1980s and 1990s: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Entrepreneurs in these countries realised that they had something that the old world did not - plentiful, cheap, labour – and that buying capital goods from Germany or Japan enabled them to compete on the world stage.
Where these small countries led, China and others are now following. China – which just 20 years ago was an exporter of coal, oil and various other commodities – is now a manufacturing powerhouse and commodity importer. The developed world’s core competence, turning raw materials into manufactured products, was taken away from them.
The Three Pillars of Discontent
The symptoms then are clear: the traditional growth driver of the developed world is behind it, and we suffer from stagnant GDP and rising inequality. But the cause of the ultimate disease is more complicated than just China learned to manufacture things. Indeed, we see three long-term drivers behind the developed world’s malaise: demographics, commodities and globalisation.
https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1580343794095955969
https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1580259735114219539
Everyone starts from their conclusion (immigrants, China, shareholder capitalism, social democratic government) and works out how that is the key driver behind stagnant incomes.
https://twitter.com/DavidRoe92/status/1580442854106669056
1) As the rewards for employment have fallen, the returns on capital have increased dramatically (especially true in the USA btw)
2) Income is taxed very heavily, capital is taxed relatively lightly and land not taxed at all.
3) The efficiency of government spending has collapsed as public services are no longer controlled by the taxpayer.
These problems date at least to the end of the 1960s.
Major reforms of employment are needed, including promoting self employment and small businesses. A major shift in the tax system is needed including an increase in wealth and capital taxes and a sharp reduction of the income tax burden. Major administrative reform is needed, including radical decentralization and a simplification of the role of the state.
At 10 million words, the UK still has the longest tax code in the world. Aiming to cut that would be a massive task, but the fiscal burden of administration is most definitely "anti-growth". We need a whole new approach, but our politics doesn´t even understand the question. Hence in order to address the economic crisis, we need to address the failures of our politics.
There can be no prosperity without reform.
In which we learn that the markets are being unfair to Britain over Brexit; it's everyone else's fault; and how Truss & Kwarteng need daily televised public briefings to explain why they're right.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/12/zombie-economy-crumbling-real-culprits-getting-scot-free/ https://twitter.com/rolandmcs/status/1580415229229309952/photo/1
More people than I expected were willing to say that they broadly agree with the Bernie Sanders analysis, even if many didn’t see him as the vehicle to any resolution.
Americans (of the left) were brimming with suggestions for changing their political system to make it more responsive to majority concerns, but don’t see a viable route to bring change about and are being pushed onto the defensive by the distraction of the (futile) cultural wars the right are trying to stoke up.
Yesterday - an apocalyptic PMQs, a terrible tour of the tea rooms, and a combative 22 committee meeting with many reports of it being the worst ever attended. Plus the comedy stylings of JRM denouncing the BBC and the IMF for their impertinence of disagreeing with him.
We are very clearly in the End Times.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1580263120349450240
These are the dying days of the Truss experiment. She is the only one who doesn't know it yet.
That was kind of my whole point in fact - I diagnose the problem in one way, pagan another, you probably another, based on our existing biases. No one really knows where the truth lies, least of all economists.
Though that's more to do with Braverman complaining about Indian visitors who overstay their visas.
He adds that change can be unsettling and cause a market reaction, but it is necessary to grow the economy.
https://trib.al/Rx0iR33
📺 Sky 501 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1580445460950822912/video/1
Quite bizarre really. Almost the only benefit to Brexit was the theoretical ability to trade freely outside of the EU. Boris Johnson got that. Now the Truss-Braverman Gov't appeared to have screwed it up.
I liked that tweet that "Suella Braverman is what you get when you feed Priti Patel after midnight"
History demonstrates that voting for (or revolting in support of) extreme people or solutions typically damages everyone, with the chance to build a better world sometimes (but certainly not always) only emerging from the ashes of terrible experience. What we need is a shortcut to the latter that avoids the intervening apocalypse that only Leon would enjoy.
Being asked about the problems of business, and what government needs to do to help, she just answered "Truss must go, now". Which seemed (oddly) unexpected, as the interview was immediately truncated.
This is the same problem we had with the SM writ large. It was of course possible for us to thrive in the SM, as Germany did, but it would have needed a completely different policy mix from governments who almost certainly would not have been re-elected.
Simplistic, idealistic notions of the benefits of free trade, low or non existent tariffs have completely undermined the majority of western society. Those with capital or with exceptional skills at the top have, of course, gained massively and we have seen GDP creep up, usually with increasing trade deficits as we import much of what we used to make.
If the Trussites want to continue in power, they need to win the argument. But the argument they need to win is not growth vs. not growth, it’s how will tax cuts funded by borrowing deliver growth. Does anyone here think they understand that?
And Truss? She is painfully out of her depth and is to be very publicly humiliated and laughed out of office. That's a hard gig even when its self-inflicted.
In his magisterial history of the seventeenth century, Global Crisis, Geoffrey Parker explains how an exogenous shock – in that case the little ice age – resulted in a series of uprisings across the globe. The people, instead of realising the climate was to blame for falling crop yields (and therefore poverty and death), instead fixed their eyes up on the elites, and the existing social structure. The result was a century of revolutions, revolts, uprisings and wars.
There is a type of multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma here. For an individual family it is better when two adults work rather than one. But because most people choose to take the action that improves their personal lot, the overall effect on society is negative. Over time it becomes more or less necessary for both adults to work. A concrete example is allowing the size of a mortgage to be assessed using joint incomes rather than just one income. It allows one family with two working parents to buy a bigger house, but over a 20 year time scale the benefits have just been swallowed up by house price inflation.
World Trade 1929-1933, as % of World GDP
Source: League of Nations’ World Economic Survey 1932-33
It is true that the benefits of free trade appear very unequal: to an unemployed steel worker in Sunderland, the 1% in his country have gotten wealthier, as have the people of China and other emerging markets, while he has found himself without a job. The problem is that the proposed alternatives – of erecting tariff barriers – make the problem worse.
Raising tariff barriers on – say – imported steel to maintain jobs in Redcar or Port Talbot won’t save those jobs. Or, if it temporarily does, it will do so at the expense of the steel consumers of the UK – car makers and the like.
But let us imagine this issue could be solved (and that we could avoid retaliatory tariffs from those affected by our actions): who would be the purchaser of manufactured products from us if we attempted to protect our industries? We would be making a conscious decision to produce goods at above world market prices. And we need our exports: because without exports of goods and services, we cannot afford the natural gas and oil and the like we need.
As we discussed in Why We Were Rich, above, the developed world used to have the monopoly on manufacturing goods. It no longer does. Attempting to protect industries that are no longer competitive will not help them, it will merely unbalance economies further. Recognising this is painful. Not recognising it is worse.
https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1580264025648431105
I wonder what exactly Braverman expects the Indian government to do about visa overstayers? It is a problem for the enforcement team in the Home Office. This seems to be in line with the Brexiteer tradition of blaming other people/countries for our own failures. The Conservatives have run out of ideas, and people are now tired of hearing from them.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/quentin-letts-defeated-silence-was-all-her-mps-could-muster-h0kxkn6bz
If the monarch clearly thinks his Prime Minister is a joke, then for all those Conservative MPs who consider themselves a royalist, time to act.
Demographics needs tweaking for more childcare, and fewer retirement years. Commodities by making more efficient use of existing resources/fewer resources. And on globalisation we need to row back a bit.
But, I don't see any easy paths to get to 2.5-3.5% growth pa again, unless there is an epoch defining technological breakthrough in the West alone.
Abhorrence at slavery led to a global campaign for its abolition. The Opium Wars led to the treaty port of Hong Kong, which became the most successful economy in China and seeded democracy there. The end of the East India Company and the rise of the Raj led to the creation of democratic and legal institutions in India, which fostered self-government and are still used to this day.
If we're going to teach history to all British schoolchildren - which I'm all for - then let's have it in full please, and not politicise it one way or the other depending on what's currently in vogue.
Beyond the economy and keeping people safe is there anything obvious that western governments can do? Promote health and fitness at an individual level seems an easy win. People who are healthier feel happier just like people who are wealthier. People who are fitter are more productive workers and cost the state less in healthcare. Small changes in millions of peoples routines can make massive changes to their outlook, and real progess can be made over a 4 or 5 year electoral cycle.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/13/bank-england-risks-continuing-supply-cheap-money-back-door/
This morning it seems this view it's positively fashionable, as dozens follow suit https://twitter.com/samcoatessky/status/1579912033562398720
CON 23 (+1)
LAB 51 (-1)
LIB DEM 9 (=)
GREEN 7 (+1)
REFORM 3 (-2)
Fieldwork 11/12 October https://twitter.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1580453294258163712/photo/1
It will be what it will be. Pointless worrying about it.
The elephant in the room is that the energy crisis is still live. We don't have enough generating capacity now, and if Russia sabotages supply / transmission then that is even more of a problem.
KT insist that they have fixed the problem. Nobody will face unpayable bills (deluded), nobody will have to ration power (laughable) and anyone talking down Britain is in the anti-growth coalition and an agent of Putin.
Boris would have done the whole wartime spirit thing, pull together, we'll get through. Truss is sneering and insisting there is nothing to pull together for. That will end very very badly if the winter gets cold. How can they not see this?
She is, to quote, in office but not in power.