EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
And TV and cinema...
S Korea is going to face its own set of problems - they've an ongoing demographic disaster with the world's lowest birthrate, and their export oriented economy faces problems, if the world falls back into protectionist blocks - but they are actively planning to address those problems.
We seem to to flap around aimlessly, distracted by pointless culture wars like Brexit.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
In addition to the collapse of British Volt, I hear rumours that the much trumpeted passenger line through Blyth has needed £70 m more in funds and is already a year behind schedule. Looks like the new Labour MP will get to open the stations.
British Volt deserved to go down - they didn't seem to have the skills required to actually create a large battery factory. Which is why they couldn't raise the money.
Given the battery shortage at the moment, this means that they really looked unattractive to investors.
Which members of the Royal Family make a positive contribution to the country? Only the Prince and Princess of Wales have a majority of the British public saying they do. All except Harry, Meghan and Andrew have seen their numbers improve since 2020, however. https://twitter.com/JoeTwyman/status/1615346825963372544
What is explanation for apparent rise in appreciation (if that's really the word?) for Prince Edward and Zara T?
They very kindly haven't impinged on the consciousness?
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
In addition to the collapse of British Volt, I hear rumours that the much trumpeted passenger line through Blyth has needed £70 m more in funds and is already a year behind schedule. Looks like the new Labour MP will get to open the stations.
British Volt deserved to go down - they didn't seem to have the skills required to actually create a large battery factory. Which is why they couldn't raise the money.
Given the battery shortage at the moment, this means that they really looked unattractive to investors.
No large domestic market might have had as much, if not more to do with it.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
In addition to the collapse of British Volt, I hear rumours that the much trumpeted passenger line through Blyth has needed £70 m more in funds and is already a year behind schedule. Looks like the new Labour MP will get to open the stations.
British Volt deserved to go down - they didn't seem to have the skills required to actually create a large battery factory. Which is why they couldn't raise the money.
Given the battery shortage at the moment, this means that they really looked unattractive to investors.
No large domestic market might have had as much, if not more to do with it.
The international market is tight enough that any exchange rate issue would be a small detail. Given what I've seen of what they done so far, the investors would have been really unimpressed.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
None if that counts if there aren't also buyers prepared to sign contracts for large scale production. And at the moment in the UK, there aren't.
Manufacturing policy has to be coherent, not piecemeal.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
None if that counts if there aren't also buyers prepared to sign contracts for large scale production. And at the moment in the UK, there aren't.
Manufacturing policy has to be coherent, not piecemeal.
I would argue that access to markets is one of those essential things that governments ought to be “providing”.
But again, I don’t really know much about BV specifically.
The Asian tigers basically forced manufacturers to find export markets rather than rely on often corrupt, nepotistic and backward domestic markets.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
Thanks; I've ordered it. Necessary but not sufficient sounds right to me, FWIW. Culture, of course, also counts.
There are some missiles (the carrier killer that killed 40+ civilians in the Dnipro flats, for example) that Ukraine simply can't shoot down. Patriot would change that.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
Yes there's Good and Bad Treasury Orthodoxy imo. Good = No Magic Money Tree. Bad = Inflexible Methodologies. There'd be upside in them being more creative but downside risk too - just think what might happen in a creative Treasury with the wrong people. You'd probably get worse outcomes than the old orthodoxy would deliver.
Guardian's live politics blog says this about the Scotland debate:
"Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader (he is an MSP as well as an MP), accuses Nicola Sturgeon of trying to turn this into a “political battle” when all the UK government is trying to do is protect the rights of women and girls."
This is the exact problem that Dross has so eloquently carved out. As an MSP he led the opposition to the bill, and thanks to cross party support he lost. Now as an MP he says it is right for Westminster to veto the bill to "protect the rights of women and girls". Whether you agree with him or the bill or whatever is not the issue.
There was a debate. Dross was outvoted by the other parties. Dross now thinks it isn't offside to simply have his other job overrule his failure in Holyrood.
Either the Scottish legislation has no adverse effect on the law in the rest of the UK, in which case the Scottish government will prevail, when this goes to Court.
Or it does have such an adverse impact, in which case the government was entirely correct to block it.
There are some missiles (the carrier killer that killed 40+ civilians in the Dnipro flats, for example) that Ukraine simply can't shoot down. Patriot would change that.
Actually, SA-10 (aka S-300) should be quite capable against AS-4 (aka Kh22)
The problem will be coverage - number of SAM systems.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
It's surprising really that Syngman Rhee would have made such reforms. South Korea was poorer than the North until well into the 1960's, when the economy took off, just as the North's faltered.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
Singapore on Thames might work very well for London as a city state. Minus the draconian authoritarian laws. RUK could do OK as a version of Malaysia/Indonesia.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
Singapore on Thames might work very well for London as a city state. Minus the draconian authoritarian laws. RUK could do OK as a version of Malaysia/Indonesia.
peed ma breeks at that one, how cuckoo can you get.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
And TV and cinema...
S Korea is going to face its own set of problems - they've an ongoing demographic disaster with the world's lowest birthrate, and their export oriented economy faces problems, if the world falls back into protectionist blocks - but they are actively planning to address those problems.
We seem to to flap around aimlessly, distracted by pointless culture wars like Brexit.
"China's population falls for first time since 1961"
China's population has fallen for the first time in 60 years, with the national birth rate hitting a record low - 6.77 births per 1,000 people.
The population in 2022 - 1.4118 billion - fell by 850,000 from 2021.
China's birth rate has been declining for years, prompting a slew of policies to try to slow the trend.
But seven years after scrapping the one-child policy, it has entered what one official described as an "era of negative population growth".
The birth rate in 2022 was also down from 7.52 in 2021, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics, which released the figures on Tuesday.
In comparison, in 2021, the United States recorded 11.06 births per 1,000 people, and the United Kingdom, 10.08 births. The birth rate for the same year in India, which is poised to overtake China as the world's most populous country, was 16.42.
Deaths also outnumbered births for the first time last year in China. The country logged its highest death rate since 1976 - 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, up from 7.18 the previous year.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
Singapore on Thames might work very well for London as a city state. Minus the draconian authoritarian laws. RUK could do OK as a version of Malaysia/Indonesia.
Is not the UK starting to resemble the Venetian Republic, with London as the heart, focus and power center. And the hinterlands beyond the Metropolitan Pale similar to the Terrafirma on the other side of the lagoon from Venice?
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Ineos has entered the bidding process to buy Manchester United. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s richest men, has confirmed that he is officially in the running to buy the club from the Glazers.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
There are some missiles (the carrier killer that killed 40+ civilians in the Dnipro flats, for example) that Ukraine simply can't shoot down. Patriot would change that.
Actually, SA-10 (aka S-300) should be quite capable against AS-4 (aka Kh22)...
They claim not (and say the same of the S300s used for ground attack). I’m not knowledgeable enough to contradict that.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
Maybe they could create a VIP lane for companies with links to Cabinet ministers that could be prioritised for government money.
Conversion therapy (including for trans) ban back on once again. Bill to be introduced.
It’s going to be complicated:
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
Sounds very like private equity in my experience! We need more spreadsheet free zones in this country.
In my continuing quest to avoid working, just flipped on TV . . . on to VERY early episode of "Perry Mason" featuring as a supporting actor a VERY young Adam West.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Both ASLEF and RMT represent train drivers. I can't remember why.
All the drivers are out - Sky: "1 and 3 February - strikes by train driver members of the RMT at 14 rail operators; train driver members of Aslef will strike on the same days"
I believe there are deep rooted issues as to why some drivers are in RMT. And some degree of lingering animosity.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
Anyway you'll all be pleased to know that I've found the solution for the Met Police's current woes (and that of other forces with the occasional bad apple in their ranks).
Rather than all the agonising, they need to take a robust Caledonian (with an appropriate hat-tip to the Caledonian politicians trialling this) approach to it all.
1. Firmly state that police officers who misbehave are not "real" police officers.
3. Point out that criticisms should not be based on one or two incidents, however regrettable. Bonus points if these are described as mere anecdotes. If feeling brave, they can also say that the number of victims is statistically insignificant.
4. Point out that police officers just want to be left alone to get on with their lives and jobs without being labelled as "predators" and that all this criticism is making police officers feel sad and marginalised and victimised.
6. They might even want to suggest that those raising concerns are just prejudiced against the police. The word "bigot" or "bigotry" should be suggested.
7. If the victims or those with concerns persist, say that this is no more than a "moral panic" reminiscent of previous moral panics, picking one superficially similar but sufficiently long ago that listeners nod along in agreement without realising the inappropriateness of the comparison.
8. As for all these impertinent demands for more due diligence and vetting and checking etc, simply say that the tenor of the times is against such "indignities". A simple self-identification by people wanting to join the police that they are - or "identify" as - "good guys" should be more than sufficient.
This will have the happy consequence of freeing up a lot of money which can be used for, ooh, I don't know, attacking those who raise concerns, perhaps even investigating them for "hate" crimes against the police or even non-crime "hate" incidents.
There. That was easy. I'm so glad we've sorted that problem.
(Just in case there are any credulous MPs, senior policemen or Home Office officials reading, this is meant sarcastically. And by "credulous" I mean more credulous than SNP members, admittedly a very low bar indeed.)
Both ASLEF and RMT represent train drivers. I can't remember why.
Apparently (based on intensive 30-sec of googling) from their origins in late 19th-century, membership of National Union of Railwaymen (subsumed into RMT) was open to all (blue-collar) railroad workers; however, the majority of locomotive engineers and firemen instead affiliated with craft union that ended up ASLEF.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
Both ASLEF and RMT represent train drivers. I can't remember why.
Apparently (based on intensive 30-sec of googling) from their origins in late 19th-century, membership of National Union of Railwaymen (subsumed into RMT) was open to all (blue-collar) railroad workers; however, the majority of locomotive engineers and firemen instead affiliated with craft union that ended up ASLEF.
In my semi-humble (and more than quasi-ignorant) opinion, Hackney Marshes are well within the Metro Pale, functioning as its kidney (or colon?).
Sorta like the New Jersey Meadowlands for Greater Gotham.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Why do business with British Volt?
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
It's surprising really that Syngman Rhee would have made such reforms. South Korea was poorer than the North until well into the 1960's, when the economy took off, just as the North's faltered.
There was a Cambridge "economist" who, as recently as the late 70s or early 80s, confidently predicted that the richer, more successful North would inevitably subsume the South.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Why do business with British Volt?
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
One might get the impression, that their business model was getting a large pile of cash from government, above delivering any batteries.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
The willingness of populations to work long hours for little pay, that is then all saved (i.e. used to keep cost of capital low for exporters), while said countries also benefit from collapsing birth rates, is behind the economic success stories almost everywhere.
Conversion therapy (including for trans) ban back on once again. Bill to be introduced.
It’s going to be complicated:
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Why do business with British Volt?
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
One might get the impression, that their business model was getting a large pile of cash from government, above delivering any batteries.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
The last bit is a mixed blessing for the blue team. There have been substantial drifts both ways- both to the left and to the right. It's going to be tricky to win back both, and it might be that moves to attract voter A repel voter B.
Two fronted wars are hard to win. One of the reason that 2019 worked was that Labour and Lib Dems were so busy committing hari-kari that the Conservatives could go hunting to their right without comeback.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Why do business with British Volt?
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
In extremis, as a primary investor, you would buy out the assets and put in new management in with a new funding schedule if it's of strategic importance, and the business case still stacks up, as this does.
Under your approach you'd have let Rolls Royce go to the wall in 1971.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
The last bit is a mixed blessing for the blue team. There have been substantial drifts both ways- both to the left and to the right. It's going to be tricky to win back both, and it might be that moves to attract voter A repel voter B.
Two fronted wars are hard to win. One of the reason that 2019 worked was that Labour and Lib Dems were so busy committing hari-kari that the Conservatives could go hunting to their right without comeback.
Rishi has already got a 5% swing from LD to Tory in bluewall seats since Truss was PM
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
And it does actually appear to be fairly easy. If they can get through with a limited amount of disruption it's the sort of thing people will simply get used to. But it was still searching for a problem.
Conversion therapy (including for trans) ban back on once again. Bill to be introduced.
It’s going to be complicated:
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
Is “affirmative care” (sic) “care” or “conversion therapy”?
Stonewall and their acolytes (including the ScotGov report on this) argue the former. Critics argue the latter, “transing the gay away”.
I think the Swedish approach of watchful waiting and no drugs for under 18s except in exceptional cases, and pushing neither transition nor status quo the best approach.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
The willingness of populations to work long hours for little pay, that is then all saved (i.e. used to keep cost of capital low for exporters), while said countries also benefit from collapsing birth rates, is behind the economic success stories almost everywhere.
A good video from Wendover, plotting the recent industrial history of South Korea:
I can't decide whether 'not a shock' is a deliberate electrical pun or not
Utterly shortsighted by HMT. The Americans would never have let this fail.
F-ing process jockeys with no vision, no courage and no risk appetite - with cowardly politicians on top.
Shit.
Welcome to where I've been for the last 5 years. The whole Treasury needs junking and replacing.
You and I and other posters have been talking about this for a long time.
Someone really needs to write a proper book on this topic.
There are various silly debates on who the real “elite” is in the UK. Is it the “right” (generally speaking, the bankers, big business, Tory donors, and the cultural remnants of the aristocracy and the Church of England)?
Or is it the “left” (the bien pensant Islingtonians, senior civil servants and charity executives, academics, and liberal journalists)?
Well, the actual answer in the UK is the Treasury.
No the Treasury is just a bunch of junior civil servants with an institutional aversion to doing anything. Its direction is set by the Chancellor and the PM and the Treasury can be bent to their will given sufficient effort. The "elite" in this country is quite diffuse and contains elements of all the groups you mention.
They can be bent, but I strongly suspect that most MPs are scared of them and don’t have the intellectual experience to challenge them. And, at the end of the day they control all the spending.
Treasury appears to have a very rigid idea of what works and what doesn’t, and they are not completely wrong. It’s just that neither are they completely right, and they tend to defeat politicians who might want to challenge them.
The Truss-Kwarteng fiasco will only have strengthened their intellectual death-grip.
I don't hold any candle for the Treasury - I turned down a job there to do something more interesting earlier in my career and certainly don't regret it. But I think it's not unreasonable that the people responsible for spending our money are averse to throwing it around like confetti. And the Trussterfuck episode simply illustrates that managing the economy successfully is harder than it looks, so perhaps Treasury orthodoxy has something going for it. Osborne's austerity was a mistake (as I thought at the time). That was facilitated by Treasury orthodoxy but ultimately the thinking came from the political leadership - as it should of course.
The basic issue with the Treasury is the failure to understand the idea of creating something from nothing and that is the root cause of why the decision making is poor and why the UK struggles to capture market share in capital intensive industries. Look at where the UK has had recent success, it's all in the information or IP space, an area where very little capital investment is required beyond buying your data scientists a laptop and having reasonably good internet. Where businesses in the UK try to create something where nothing exists or there's nothing to build on (say a battery industry) the Treasury will run it's models and stick in a bunch of 0s and unsurprisingly get a bunch of 0s in the output and investment isn't backed or subsidised.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
And I would add that, while this seemed smart in the 80s against the legacy of picking winners etc, the economic evidence increasingly suggests that governments do actually need to invest in infrastructure and R&D if they want to provide the conditions for private business to do its thing.
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
Splurging on British Volt, directly, would be picking winners/losers.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
But, with too purist a form of thinking on that Airbus would never have emerged as a major competitior to (that eventually overtook) Boeing. It has masses of state support, as does Boeing from the US government of course.
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Either do it as a state run company, or provide incentives. Investing in privately run companies is picking the winners - rarely a good plan for governments.
I don't agree - i view it as a public-private partnership. There are plenty of examples of this in operations and maintenance; why not in set-up too?
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
Why do business with British Volt?
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
In extremis, as a primary investor, you would buy out the assets and put in new management in with a new funding schedule if it's of strategic importance, and the business case still stacks up, as this does.
Under your approach you'd have let Rolls Royce go to the wall in 1971.
Rolls Royce had to make a business case to get rescued. They had a moderate sized actual business making things that actually existed. They had a track record in making things. They had expertise in making said things. They had other investors investing in them making things. They had detailed plans for exactly where the government money would go.
British Volt have none of those things.
The government would be better off finding a new company to buy up anything left for tupence and actually making some batteries.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
Just been watching the news. You can tell when Stugeon is lying. Her lips move.
I thought her response to Mason on whether this could just be sincere disagreement very telling - and quite a contrast to Jack’s performance in the HoC where he stressed the need to find a solution that works for both parties.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
And it does actually appear to be fairly easy. If they can get through with a limited amount of disruption it's the sort of thing people will simply get used to. But it was still searching for a problem.
If something is needed (which it isn't) why not just ask for ID from people who don't bring their polling card with them?
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
Korea's push to export nuclear reactors gains new momentum
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/01/120_343737.html Korea's campaign to export nuclear reactors and related facilities is gaining fresh momentum on the occasion of President Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the two countries agreed to cooperate for additional nuclear projects in either the UAE or third countries, such as the U.K.
Yoon will wrap up his state visit to the UAE on Tuesday afternoon (local time), after fruitful summit diplomacy, including securing the UAE's commitment to invest $30 billion in Korean companies guaranteed through a joint declaration and a total of 48 memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between the two countries.
Nuclear energy is one of the areas that is expected to facilitate bilateral cooperation.
While promising an astonishing amount of investment, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said his country decided to do so in recognition of the successful construction and operation of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, which was built by Korean companies.
During the leaders' visit to the nuclear plant on Monday, Yoon noted, "Now is the time for both Korea and the UAE to join hands to create additional nuclear power partnerships in the UAE and other countries."...
Yep, the Koreans did a bloody good job on the four-reactor Barakah nuclear plant, the first of its type operational.
Dare I say it, but the Koreans are going to be more reliable partners than the Chinese. Or the French.
They do seem to be usurping our traditional role as arms exporter and provider of nuclear engineering. I see their next generation combat aircraft made its first supersonic flight today. Probably a more realistic program than our hazy joint venture with the Japanese.
In South East Asia over the last 20 years there’s been an interesting shift in perception. 20 years ago the best stuff was from the USA, or at a pinch, Japan. Now it’s clearly Korea, from washing machines to pop to cosmetics to food.
I am reading “How Asia Works”, which I think was an FT Best Books winner last year.
Quite fascinating, in that it suggests the key behind Korea’s success was breaking up land ownership to create small landholders in (I think) the 1950s.
This created a large “middle class” of people who were incented to work for their own prosperity and allowed them to create surplus for entrepreneurial investment.
I keep wondering if there are lessons for the UK, which has managed to gear itself into a machine for rentiers to make money.
Modern Korea is very much a machine for rentiers to make money, too.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Read the book! I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
It's surprising really that Syngman Rhee would have made such reforms. South Korea was poorer than the North until well into the 1960's, when the economy took off, just as the North's faltered.
There was a Cambridge "economist" who, as recently as the late 70s or early 80s, confidently predicted that the richer, more successful North would inevitably subsume the South.
On the contrary, I think at some point in the next decade NK will collapse, and while reunification will be problematic, it will largely solve SK demographics.
There is an interesting line of argument that it was the Vietnam war that jump-started the SK economy. The USA wanted troops and paid for SK troops to go in quite substantial numbers and these men were paid at decent rates. As well as this there was direct economic aid to SK. 350 000 Koreans served in Vietnam.
Not only did this expose Koreans to US consumer goods, it gave them enough cash and education to better themselves. It turns out that a well paid peasantry does a lot for ground level economic development.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
I wouldn't assume it's all Conservative vs Liberal Democrats by any stretch. The 42 include (outside London) Filton & Bradley Stoke, Milton Keynes North, Milton Keynes South, Reading West and Wycombe which are clearly Conservative-Labour marginals.
What we don't of course know is what's happening in each seat and the degree to which tactical voting will or might occur in each seat.
Conversion therapy (including for trans) ban back on once again. Bill to be introduced.
It’s going to be complicated:
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
Is “affirmative care” (sic) “care” or “conversion therapy”?
Stonewall and their acolytes (including the ScotGov report on this) argue the former. Critics argue the latter, “transing the gay away”.
I think the Swedish approach of watchful waiting and no drugs for under 18s except in exceptional cases, and pushing neither transition nor status quo the best approach.
There also is no definition of therapist. It isn't a regulated profession.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
I find it interesting just how many people think it is a bad idea to have to prove your right to vote. Are they of the no ID card persuasion? Or is it because they thinks it a vote suppressing trick? Or just not needed?
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
I wouldn't assume it's all Conservative vs Liberal Democrats by any stretch. The 42 include (outside London) Filton & Bradley Stoke, Milton Keynes North, Milton Keynes South, Reading West and Wycombe which are clearly Conservative-Labour marginals.
What we don't of course know is what's happening in each seat and the degree to which tactical voting will or might occur in each seat.
Sunak also leads Starmer 42% to 34% as preferred PM in the bluewall seats
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
The last bit is a mixed blessing for the blue team. There have been substantial drifts both ways- both to the left and to the right. It's going to be tricky to win back both, and it might be that moves to attract voter A repel voter B.
Two fronted wars are hard to win. One of the reason that 2019 worked was that Labour and Lib Dems were so busy committing hari-kari that the Conservatives could go hunting to their right without comeback.
Rishi has already got a 5% swing from LD to Tory in bluewall seats since Truss was PM
If we're going to make these kind of claims, let's check the evidence.
This is the fifth Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall poll.
The Conservative figures have been: 28, 33, 32, 30 and 30
The Liberal Democrat figures have been 24, 16, 23, 21 and 21
The swing since the first poll (conducted while Truss was still Prime Minister) from Conservative to Liberal Democrat is 2.5% though the swing since the second poll (conducted on 28-29 October so after Sunak became Prime Minister) is 4% from Conservative to the Liberal Democrats.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Given most Blue Wall sears outside London are straight Tory v LD battles that is not necessarily too bad news for Sunak if Labour is up and the LDs are down.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
I wouldn't assume it's all Conservative vs Liberal Democrats by any stretch. The 42 include (outside London) Filton & Bradley Stoke, Milton Keynes North, Milton Keynes South, Reading West and Wycombe which are clearly Conservative-Labour marginals.
What we don't of course know is what's happening in each seat and the degree to which tactical voting will or might occur in each seat.
I agree the Redfield write up of their own poll is more than iffy, as they say "In 2019, Labour came THIRD in these seats" which may be true across the seats as a whole but definitely isn't for every individual seat.
There is, though, some polling in there on tactical voting that has to be a worry for the Lib Dems. This refers to willingness to vote tactically, where propensity to do so appears to have reduced compared with a couple of months ago or the last election. That will probably weaken as campaigns ramp up in individual seats (people get a few Focuses and resolve to vote Labour come what may does tend to weaken), but it's a bit counterintuitive and not great for the Lib Dems.
And apparently Clarkson has been dumped by Amazon Prime.
He has stuffed himself big time, thought he was a smart arse but finds out he is just an arse.
Not sure that’s true. If you watch the first episode of The Grand Tour, there is a montage of his sacking and it leads into a joyous new era. I suspect the same will happen again. It’s not as if the BBC and Amazon are the only options.
It’s being reported that their contract will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of years’ time, much more to do with falling audiences, especially in the US, than any more recent ‘incidents’.
Conversion therapy (including for trans) ban back on once again. Bill to be introduced.
It’s going to be complicated:
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
Is “affirmative care” (sic) “care” or “conversion therapy”?
Stonewall and their acolytes (including the ScotGov report on this) argue the former. Critics argue the latter, “transing the gay away”.
I think the Swedish approach of watchful waiting and no drugs for under 18s except in exceptional cases, and pushing neither transition nor status quo the best approach.
There also is no definition of therapist. It isn't a regulated profession.
I asked an actual psychiatrist about this - they are very concerned that there is no definition of where boundaries are. Apparently tons of people think they are trans relative to the number that are - they often have other, recognised sexual/body image issues. So they have to tell people they are probably not trans…
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
I find it interesting just how many people think it is a bad idea to have to prove your right to vote. Are they of the no ID card persuasion? Or is it because they thinks it a vote suppressing trick? Or just not needed?
You don't need to prove your right to vote with ID, just prove who you are. Something that only requires a signature for postal votes.
If there is systemic multiple voting, then I think it far more likely with postal and proxy voting than in person. What we have is a solution looking for a problem, and a form of voter suppression.
I think the @RCS1000 idea of photographing people without ID a better solution.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
I find it interesting just how many people think it is a bad idea to have to prove your right to vote. Are they of the no ID card persuasion? Or is it because they thinks it a vote suppressing trick? Or just not needed?
For what it's worth, I currently have no photo ID that would be accepted at a polling station. I'm sceptical about ID cards, and do believe the government's motivation is vote suppression.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
I find it interesting just how many people think it is a bad idea to have to prove your right to vote. Are they of the no ID card persuasion? Or is it because they thinks it a vote suppressing trick? Or just not needed?
For me it's because the right to vote is a fundamental right that people have died for. Everyone has the right to vote even (especially) those at the margins of society, those who lead busy or chaotic lives, or those who think that voting is barely worth it. For that reason, the state shouldn't put any unnecessary barriers between voters and the ballot box. Since personation is an absolutely marginal problem (unlike postal voting fraud which is a big problem) requiring photographic ID to vote is an unnecessary barrier to voting. We know it's a barrier because trials have shown it stops some people from voting. And we know it's unnecessary because personation is a marginal problem. And we also know that the poor are fundamentally less likely to have photo ID, which should be troubling for anyone who supports equal voting rights, especially as the poor are already less likely to vote. If personation were a major problem I would support requiring photo ID, but only if photo ID became free and mandatory for all citizens to ensure that absolutely everyone had it.
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
No matter how much is done a lot of people will still have no idea.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
I have to give ID to pick up post, yet can turn up at a polling booth, say I’m John Smith (in reality my neighbour) and steal his vote. I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
That's true. Except Royal Mail does not require photo ID to collect your post, and your neighbour will discover you have voted on his behalf when he turns up to vote; even if you have locked him in your cellar, a single vote is unlikely to change the result of an election in any constituency.
We do ID for lots of stuff in everyday life. I don’t know why we don’t for such an important thing as voting. It’s not really about personation, it’s about respecting the importance of the vote, for me at least. Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
He would know someone had stolen his vote, and so would the election workers, yet there are very few reported incidents of personation (perhaps because personation is very hard to organise on the scale needed to swing an election).
I find it interesting just how many people think it is a bad idea to have to prove your right to vote. Are they of the no ID card persuasion? Or is it because they thinks it a vote suppressing trick? Or just not needed?
You don't need to prove your right to vote with ID, just prove who you are. Something that only requires a signature for postal votes.
If there is systemic multiple voting, then I think it far more likely with postal and proxy voting than in person. What we have is a solution looking for a problem, and a form of voter suppression.
I think the @RCS1000 idea of photographing people without ID a better solution.
Yes, I didn't mean right to vote. I’d settle for either the polling card, or you prove who you are. I don’t believe it’s about voter suppression, but maybe I’m not cynical enough. Many western democracies require voter ID - are they all suppressing the votes of the poor?
Comments
EXCLUSIVE: Just 30% of voters say they are aware of new law requiring photo ID at polling stations, meaning millions risk being turned away from polls in May.
Only one-in-ten say they've received info from local authorities about the new requirements."
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1614949295987527680
S Korea is going to face its own set of problems - they've an ongoing demographic disaster with the world's lowest birthrate, and their export oriented economy faces problems, if the world falls back into protectionist blocks - but they are actively planning to address those problems.
We seem to to flap around aimlessly, distracted by pointless culture wars like Brexit.
That isn't a brexit issue, it's not a Labour or Tory issue, it's been this way for at least as long as we've been alive.
Given the battery shortage at the moment, this means that they really looked unattractive to investors.
Unsure how this squares with @EHRC raising exactly these concerns to Scot Gov in September.
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1615370791998353409
That’s not necessarily splurging on British Volt (I don’t know anything of them, just using as an example), but rather enabling the next British Volt to find easy access to a skilled workforce and the intellectual externalities associated with research.
I think one of the factors behind the Korean economic miracle was the willingness (perhaps semi-coerced) of a generation of Korean workers essentially to sacrifice themselves for the national project.
It's a complex and contested topic.
Providing subsidies/tax breaks for actual production of batteries would be a better idea.
We have subsidies for electric cars. Why not a subsidy per cell produced, for serious quantities, size of payment based on how much of the value is added in the UK? So an imported cell gets zero.
I think his argument falls into necessary but not sufficient. He highlights Sth Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China as having made the right land reforms at the right time to start a process of industrialisation.
Inter alia, he dismisses Singapore because they follow a model (ie a financial entrepot) which doesn’t scale beyond a single city state.
Something to think about for those aspiring to a “Singapore on Thames”.
Manufacturing policy has to be coherent, not piecemeal.
But again, I don’t really know much about BV specifically.
The Asian tigers basically forced manufacturers to find export markets rather than rely on often corrupt, nepotistic and backward domestic markets.
Necessary but not sufficient sounds right to me, FWIW. Culture, of course, also counts.
Patriot would change that.
The problem will be coverage - number of SAM systems.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-64300190
China's population has fallen for the first time in 60 years, with the national birth rate hitting a record low - 6.77 births per 1,000 people.
The population in 2022 - 1.4118 billion - fell by 850,000 from 2021.
China's birth rate has been declining for years, prompting a slew of policies to try to slow the trend.
But seven years after scrapping the one-child policy, it has entered what one official described as an "era of negative population growth".
The birth rate in 2022 was also down from 7.52 in 2021, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics, which released the figures on Tuesday.
In comparison, in 2021, the United States recorded 11.06 births per 1,000 people, and the United Kingdom, 10.08 births. The birth rate for the same year in India, which is poised to overtake China as the world's most populous country, was 16.42.
Deaths also outnumbered births for the first time last year in China. The country logged its highest death rate since 1976 - 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, up from 7.18 the previous year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domini_di_Terraferma
It's time to start thinking of government as an investor that can make good investment decisions that pay off as well as bad ones that don't, just like any other investor.
That's quite a separate point from saying it should never make any investment decisions in case it picks a loser, which I think is borderline dogmatic and a clear path to deterring capital intensive start-ups.
Ri… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1615398600762134528
Keir Starmer Blue Wall Net Approval… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1615401126857146384
The legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2023-01-17/hcws500
Geezer gold!
There was a clear business case for this. The issue was upfront investment to fund early construction costs and get it off the ground.
It's a shit decision. And shows huge inflexibility by HMT.
I believe there are deep rooted issues as to why some drivers are in RMT. And some degree of lingering animosity.
Rather than all the agonising, they need to take a robust Caledonian (with an appropriate hat-tip to the Caledonian politicians trialling this) approach to it all.
1. Firmly state that police officers who misbehave are not "real" police officers.
2. Repeat at every opportunity that the problem is not "police officers" but "predatory males". (© N Sturgeon) This should impress the quite large group of people who find it hard to understand that Group A and Group B can have some members in common and/or never learnt about Venn diagrams.)
3. Point out that criticisms should not be based on one or two incidents, however regrettable. Bonus points if these are described as mere anecdotes. If feeling brave, they can also say that the number of victims is statistically insignificant.
4. Point out that police officers just want to be left alone to get on with their lives and jobs without being labelled as "predators" and that all this criticism is making police officers feel sad and marginalised and victimised.
5. Dismiss the concerns of victims or those worried about these police officers as "not valid". (© N Sturgeon)
6. They might even want to suggest that those raising concerns are just prejudiced against the police. The word "bigot" or "bigotry" should be suggested.
7. If the victims or those with concerns persist, say that this is no more than a "moral panic" reminiscent of previous moral panics, picking one superficially similar but sufficiently long ago that listeners nod along in agreement without realising the inappropriateness of the comparison.
8. As for all these impertinent demands for more due diligence and vetting and checking etc, simply say that the tenor of the times is against such "indignities". A simple self-identification by people wanting to join the police that they are - or "identify" as - "good guys" should be more than sufficient.
9. If necessary, those bleating about the importance of "safeguarding" can be told that this is no more than "middle class gate-keeping". (© Karen Adams MSP) This should keep the Police Federation firmly on side.
This will have the happy consequence of freeing up a lot of money which can be used for, ooh, I don't know, attacking those who raise concerns, perhaps even investigating them for "hate" crimes against the police or even non-crime "hate" incidents.
There. That was easy. I'm so glad we've sorted that problem.
(Just in case there are any credulous MPs, senior policemen or Home Office officials reading, this is meant sarcastically. And by "credulous" I mean more credulous than SNP members, admittedly a very low bar indeed.)
'...hinterlands beyond the Metropolitan Pale....'
First time I've heard Hackney Marshes referred to in that way but you could be right.
Getty Images are suing the company behind Stable Diffusion, for copyright infringement and not getting permission to use images in training data.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit
A Dozen Selected Projects Will Develop Advanced EV Batteries that Charge Faster, Have Greater Efficiency and Resilience, and Boost Consumer Confidence Against Range Anxiety
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases/us-department-energy-announces-42-million-develop-more-affordable-efficient-advanced-ev-batteries-america
Met police confirm a man has been charged with assaulting Aaron Ramsdale after NLD
Joseph Watts, 35, of Hackney is due to appear at Highbury Magistrates’ Court on Friday, 17 February.
https://twitter.com/_DanMatthews_/status/1615405448609337377
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2023/01/17/real-reason-behind-amazons-jeremy-clarkson-cancellation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/opinion/letters/100-year-old-doctor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR2mGS-H7DBGI3WPvLL7q1msHY_lTVzuYCwXFJbTtTpZf5k28mOcIo-uHJc
Sorta like the New Jersey Meadowlands for Greater Gotham.
I do wonder if Clarkson has managed to make this about "woke" rather than declining viewership.
Have a look at them.
It has the smell of “book the Private Eye special now”
Unless you want some PPE?
They, essentially, are flailing around in an industry they don’t know or understand.
Good to see some "Blue Wall" polling out from R&W. Little move in the headline figures - Labour still leads by nine points and it's a 19.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. The Conservative to LD swing is 7% even though the LDs are down six from 2019 GE numbers (Reform are up to six).
The deeper figures aren't so bad for the Conservatives though it's more bumping along the bottom than big gains.
54% of the 2019 Conservative vote is still loyal but the number going Labour has fallen as the numbers going Don't Know and Reform has increased. Only 56% of Labour voters are now considering a tactical vote which isn't good news for the LDs and overall those considering and not considering tactical voting are the same at 43%.
Not sure what this would mean for the 42 constituencies on the Blue Wall list. The May local elections could tell us a lot more about what's happening in each constituency.
Also more 2019 Tory voters there going RefUK or DK than Labour
Define conversion.
Define therapy.
Now, people do tend to overreact to the idea of requiring photo ID at polling stations, acting like it is the most terrible thing imaginable even when many decently run countries have such things (arguments over generalised provision of IDs), but given the major potential issues around voting does not appear to have been personation, it was in my view probably not necessary.
Amazon wouldn't give a toss if they were still making a fortune from him.
Two fronted wars are hard to win. One of the reason that 2019 worked was that Labour and Lib Dems were so busy committing hari-kari that the Conservatives could go hunting to their right without comeback.
I have zero objection to proving who I am to vote. It’s an important part of life. My only stipulation is that forms of proof must be easy to obtain.
management in with a new funding schedule if it's of strategic importance, and the business case still stacks up, as this does.
Under your approach you'd have let Rolls Royce go to the wall in 1971.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1615393514132471832?s=20&t=P6Z5pMoooFho9G-Vt11Mzw
Stonewall and their acolytes (including the ScotGov report on this) argue the former. Critics argue the latter, “transing the gay away”.
I think the Swedish approach of watchful waiting and no drugs for under 18s except in exceptional cases, and pushing neither transition nor status quo the best approach.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oL0umpPPe-8
One-word summary: Samsung.
British Volt have none of those things.
The government would be better off finding a new company to buy up anything left for tupence and actually making some batteries.
Plus my neighbours vote would be stolen and he wouldn’t know it was me. How would he?
There is an interesting line of argument that it was the Vietnam war that jump-started the SK economy. The USA wanted troops and paid for SK troops to go in quite substantial numbers and these men were paid at decent rates. As well as this there was direct economic aid to SK. 350 000 Koreans served in Vietnam.
Not only did this expose Koreans to US consumer goods, it gave them enough cash and education to better themselves. It turns out that a well paid peasantry does a lot for ground level economic development.
What we don't of course know is what's happening in each seat and the degree to which tactical voting will or might occur in each seat.
It isn't a regulated profession.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1615396086373302272?t=3a5edr7AFuIMoaMlN-1vRQ&s=19
This is the fifth Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall poll.
The Conservative figures have been: 28, 33, 32, 30 and 30
The Liberal Democrat figures have been 24, 16, 23, 21 and 21
The swing since the first poll (conducted while Truss was still Prime Minister) from Conservative to Liberal Democrat is 2.5% though the swing since the second poll (conducted on 28-29 October so after Sunak became Prime Minister) is 4% from Conservative to the Liberal Democrats.
There is, though, some polling in there on tactical voting that has to be a worry for the Lib Dems. This refers to willingness to vote tactically, where propensity to do so appears to have reduced compared with a couple of months ago or the last election. That will probably weaken as campaigns ramp up in individual seats (people get a few Focuses and resolve to vote Labour come what may does tend to weaken), but it's a bit counterintuitive and not great for the Lib Dems.
At the end of the day Westminster stepped in and blocked a Bill which was passed by Scottish MSPs .
Regardless of what the court finds it’s job done for Sturgeon . Good luck to her . She knocks spots off most politicians south of the border .
If there is systemic multiple voting, then I think it far more likely with postal and proxy voting than in person. What we have is a solution looking for a problem, and a form of voter suppression.
I think the @RCS1000 idea of photographing people without ID a better solution.
Since personation is an absolutely marginal problem (unlike postal voting fraud which is a big problem) requiring photographic ID to vote is an unnecessary barrier to voting. We know it's a barrier because trials have shown it stops some people from voting. And we know it's unnecessary because personation is a marginal problem. And we also know that the poor are fundamentally less likely to have photo ID, which should be troubling for anyone who supports equal voting rights, especially as the poor are already less likely to vote.
If personation were a major problem I would support requiring photo ID, but only if photo ID became free and mandatory for all citizens to ensure that absolutely everyone had it.