Sunak also extended her comments to say cooperation over the boats is also on the agenda
It looks as if Sunak is moving us much closer to the EU and apart from the hard right ERG this should be welcomed by the vast majority
Which is what a sensible Brexit has always been: sovereignty and self-rule, while maintaining equal trade, migration and cooperation standards with the EU, the US, the Pacific trading bloc and anyone else not engaged authoritarian expansion.
"Quintessentially British products such as trees, plants and seed potatoes." If only someone had told me we had a monopoly on those.
Actrually, seed potatoes aren't far off - the Scottish climate has led to a lucrative specialist industry. I used to do vac work as a student in that field (so to speak).
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Who'd want to settle in the gulf? Unless you're a drug dealer or political exile, what's the appeal?
It will be very interesting to see how Johnson and Truss play this. If they accept the deal, they will essentially be saying Sunak got something they couldn't get. If they don't, they further stoke the Tory civil war.
The biggest loser today is Johnson, and for that we should all cheer.
To argue the contrary point, he was a genius to leave the NI issue to a time in the future, when emotions weren’t quite so high and things could be worked through in a much more pragmatic manner.
Bingo. Today is his legacy and to his credit.
NI should have always been dealt with afterwards, putting the NI cart before the Brexit horse was what made May's negotiations such an unmitigated disaster.
Just as the deficit in the run up to the GFC was Brown's legacy and to his credit?
Afterall, it should always have been dealt with afterwards. Putting the public finances cart before the GFC horse was what would have made Blair much less electorally successful. Plus it gave Osborne something to do in the days when he had nineteen fewer jobs than now.
Back to base Agent Slater, you’ve accomplished more than we dreamt possible, manoeuvring the SNP’s most capable politician into quitting, and now trashing the Greens’ reputation - truly “above and beyond”
Jesus wept. So @lornaslater knows her Deposit Return Scheme needs a UKIMA exemption; doesn’t have one; hasn’t even applied for one; yet demands businesses sign up to the scheme *by tomorrow*? This is clown car stuff.
I suspect Boris will gauge the mood of Tory MPs now that Rishi's deal is in the open. If he detects enough malcontents, then he'll quickly and noisily erect himself a platform from which to scrap it.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Who'd want to settle in the gulf? Unless you're a drug dealer or political exile, what's the appeal?
Sand, sand, and er, more sand.
Also heat - continual heat even at 3am in the morning...
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Ah OK. That's different from the kind of thing I understood it to be. Which was a way of extensively travelling the world with no ties whilst working exclusively Online. The modern equivalent of a PADI or TEFL qualification. Surely what you are describing is a fancy term for well-paid immigrant?
It’s a visa for an immigrant that doesn’t have a job locally, but has a job elsewhere that lets him work remotely, on a decent salary.
My favourite example of which, was the Maldives resort that offered a year’s stay for $20k, in the middle of the pandemic.
I would gently suggest to all those who have underrated Sunak, suggests he hides in a fridge, or is weak have been confounded today by a grown up PM who does detail and in this agreement has achieved a legacy that will long outlast his tenure
I see where you are aiming. And yet when you watch a circus it's not the poor chap who has to follow the clowns and elephants with a shovel who is regarded as the lead attraction.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
He was the Chancellor - he was responsible. The buck stops there.
On the politics, yes. And it happened - it's why he was kicked out in 2010. Slogans like 'not fixing the roof' etc worked for the Cons. No problem with that. But it's nice to get beyond that here in 2023. It's a shame to glean your entire understanding of such an important event as the GFC, its causes and its impact on the UK, from the Tory 2010 election manifesto. I think so anyway.
The Tory 2010 manifesto has nothing to do with it. As I said, I voted Labour in 2001 when the self styled Iron Chancellor was running a responsible budget but didn't in 2005 precisely as u could see what was coming. Which was a matter of when, not if.
Labour overspent from 2002 onwards. Hence my vote in 2005, hence running out of money in 2007. Only if you are stupid and pathetic enough to argue that Crises has been abolished could you think otherwise. You're not that stupid, so I can only think you're being deliberately disingenuous and pigheaded.
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
That's bullshit, it was Brown that removed the Bank from its liquidity and capital regulation role and handed it to the FSA. The severity of the UK downturn is entirely because banks were running at 50:1 leverage and they spent the following 7-10 years bringing that down to 8:1, it was Brown that oversaw it and his regulatory framework that completely missed it where the old one had specific checks on ensuring liquidity and capital were in check.
So no, it's nothing to do with what you call City culture and all down to poor regulation. Regulation that Brown created and implemented.
Worth saying that it wasn't just a UK problem though - banks worldwide were allowed to run leverage at levels that should never have been allowed...
Well this all seems pretty pragmatic with concessions by both sides. Good.
How long until the SNP leadership candidates say they would like to adopt the same type of principles in the event of leaving the UK and re-joining the EU?
It's odd that so many here on a political betting site describe the DUP and ERG as bonkers. They are far from that, being quite rational, calculating and disciplined in their political positioning. Where they differ from those calling them bonkers is in their values and aspirations for NI.
It helps to be bonkers. The ERG seems to have been pretty successful in terms of obtaining political goals over the last decades. (True, the DUP are both bonkers and been unsuccessful ).
Let's, e.g., compare it to politicians who are keen on reducing wealth inequality. This is a political goal that has gone backwards over the last decades (or at best stagnated). No matter who is in power, there has been pretty meagre progress.
As we are (probably) coming to an end of a period of Tory rule, it is instructive to consider how Tory Governments (first Thatcher and then the Brexiteers) have changed the UK very dramatically.
By comparison, the Labour Governments of my lifetime -- though sometimes competent and sometimes incompetent -- have not achieved any comparably lasting changes in the UK.
I'm no fan of the last Labour government, but the last Labour Government achieved some lasting changes in the UK. Notably more equality for homosexuality, although that was a global phenomenon and they fell short of legalising equality in marriage itself which fell to David Cameron to achieve.
Devolution and BoE independence too, and the Minimum Wage.
What's remarkable though is that almost everything that the last Labour Government achieved was done in 1997/98. I'd be curious if even the most ardent of Labour supporters can name any lasting changes that were introduced from 1999 onwards?
Minimum wage -- I grant you. The Tories would never introduced that. But, it has not had much effect in reducing wealth inequality. So, in my book, it falls into the category of tinkering at the edges.
Devolution has been a disaster for Wales. It is poorer now that it was before 1999. The standard of Government has been abysmally low.
I will leave our Scottish posters to describe whether devolution has been good for Scotland.
You didn't ask for changes for the better, just lasting changes. Devolution certainly is a lasting change, even if it hasn't improved things.
On the same basis, perhaps you could include our indebtedness now as a lasting change brought about by Labour, but I don't know anyone from Labour who admits that was intentional, unlike devolution.
Increase in debt under last Labour government: £681bn. Increase in debt under current Tory government: £1,543bn. And counting.
That's a legacy of the deficit that Labour bequeathed.
Unless you think the Tories could or should have implemented a form of austerity so severe they ran a neutral budget from year one?
It was a legacy of the worst global financial crisis since WW2.
Which thanks to Brown's decade of preparation we were uniquely well-placed to weather?
You think Gordon Brown should have shut down the City and dug a big hole in the Midlands to sell commodities to China? Well, it worked for Australia.
If he'd been running a budget surplus as he should have for that stage of the economic cycle, then the deficit spending would have been far less significant afterwards and purely cyclical.
I’d say that Labour’s biggest long-term failure was letting house prices rip from 1999 to 2007.
2007 was the year that levels of home ownership began falling.
Not sure Labour could have donw much about it.
Banks shifted their lending criteria from 3x+1x earnings to 4x joint earnings and prices across the country increased to reflect the additional money people could borrow (for good and bad).I watched it happen down south in 2001/2 and then up north between 2003/4....
Brown wasn't shy about regulating the banks.
The problem is, he regulated all the wrong things...
Every CDO trader had lodged a photocopy of their passport with HR.
They had all completed their multiple choice exams (or got the desk junior to do it for them) - in how not to commit fraud. “An Orc from Mordor emails you, claiming to have a large stash of Mithril, following the fall of the Barad- Dur. Do you (a) help him sell it on the metals exchange, bypassing all regulations…. (e) call compliance”
And that's who to primarily blame for crashing the financial system. Those who did it, not those who supposedly provoked it by being lax or complacent. Similar to Putin and Ukraine.
Just as those who are primarily to blame for crashing our national Treasury accounts are those who did it (ie Gordon Brown), not those who supposedly provoked it like the Americans, or the financial sector or anyone else.
Brown was responsible for the Treasury, borrowed in the good times, then when the bad times came he inevitably had to borrow more but had no room left to manoeuvre. You can try and pin the blame on anyone else if you want a scapegoat, but those who did it, are the Treasury.
Ah I see. So 'he didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining' then?
This really is the most frightful tosh but I'm minded to cut some slack - because I sense your take on the Crash derives mainly from the Tory GE campaign of 2010. You swallowed it hook line & sinker at an impressionable time of life.
A nice political slogan but the problem is much more pernicious than that.
The country had a fantastic roof in 2001/02 that the Iron Chancellor had pledged to maintain. That's part of why I voted Labour for the only and first time in my life in 2001. Had the crisis struck in 01/02 then the Treasury would have been prepared and had the wherewithal to cope.
What's worse about Gordon Brown is that he took a fixed roof and broke it. He took the roof off in 2002 and never replace it as he'd abolished winter/boom and bust.
Pure hubris.
There's your problem right there. You start with 'Brown to blame' and work backwards, trying to make things fit. End up saying bizarre things like this.
If Brown really did cause the GFC and financial markets malfunction was responsible for public spending you'd say the main problem was the GFC not public spending. So by accident you'd be right in that case.
It was Brown's awful regulatory reform that allowed the GFC to have such a profound effect on the UK economy. Banks were leveraged at 70:1 and the FSA was mindlessly making sure that the banks had the right boxes ticked on their diversity forms.
Banks over-leveraged, cooked the books, consigned risk management to the bin, in a crazy chase for yield and remuneration. It popped and nearly brought down the financial system. Brown deserves criticism - he was there and a player, plus he took the plaudits when things were good - but it really is a mistake to overstate his contribution. The culture, a consensus here across politics, was light touch reg, markets know best, let them rock and roll so long as they pay their taxes.
He was the Chancellor - he was responsible. The buck stops there.
On the politics, yes. And it happened - it's why he was kicked out in 2010. Slogans like 'not fixing the roof' etc worked for the Cons. No problem with that. But it's nice to get beyond that here in 2023. It's a shame to glean your entire understanding of such an important event as the GFC, its causes and its impact on the UK, from the Tory 2010 election manifesto. I think so anyway.
The Tory 2010 manifesto has nothing to do with it. As I said, I voted Labour in 2001 when the self styled Iron Chancellor was running a responsible budget but didn't in 2005 precisely as u could see what was coming. Which was a matter of when, not if.
Labour overspent from 2002 onwards. Hence my vote in 2005, hence running out of money in 2007. Only if you are stupid and pathetic enough to argue that Crises has been abolished could you think otherwise. You're not that stupid, so I can only think you're being deliberately disingenuous and pigheaded.
The partisan Labour posters seem to see the claim that "Brown was a factor" as a claim that "Brown was the only factor". Nonsense on stilts, of course.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He did have an interesting op-ed in the Graun the other day on the problems of the food industry in the UK. Seems quite sane. Dunno about Mr Peston though, one way or another, but only because I do not follow his effusions.
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
If there are fewer than about 20-25, this will be the making of Sunak. Up to now, he was seen as Generic Rich Tory, and suffered from the brand damage of Osborne, May, Johnson, and, especially, Truss. Now he will set himself up to be the strong, reasonable leader that works hard in the background, gets stuff done, unites his party and plays well with others.
And I say this even though I don't have a view on the deal yet. Its great politics, let us see if it is good policy.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Ok, I suppose a Marxist dystopia under Corbyn is about the only yardstick by which Johnson's tenure could be judged non-disastrous. Point of order though. If Labour had won GE19 there wouldn't have been a Brexit Deal. There'd have been no Brexit.
Sunak also extended her comments to say cooperation over the boats is also on the agenda
It looks as if Sunak is moving us much closer to the EU and apart from the hard right ERG this should be welcomed by the vast majority
Just to add a note of caution: something being on the agenda for discussion doesn't necessarily mean a sensible deal is anywhere close. The problem with dealing with the EU - whether as a member or an outsider - is that you are not dealing with a single institution arguing in the interests of its citizens but a vast sprawling entity whose constituent factions all have different and competing interests, only some of which relate to the interests of the people they purport to represent. While there are obviously deals to be made which would be in the interests of both British people and EU citizens, that doesn't necessarily mean those deals will be reached. Possibly someone the Portuguese will be in dispute with the Spanish on matters of energy, or the EU judiciary will have fallen out with the Polish, or possibly someone will identify an opportunity to wheedle out some extra funding, or someone will need a battle cry for an election, or potentially just plain old spite may come into it, or any one of a hundred other seemingly unrelated issues may come into play.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Who'd want to settle in the gulf? Unless you're a drug dealer or political exile, what's the appeal?
Sand, sand, and er, more sand.
Also heat - continual heat even at 3am in the morning...
This time of year it’s awesome! 30ish during the day, and 20ish at night. Convertible cars with the top down, and cocktails on the beach in the evening.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Ah OK. That's different from the kind of thing I understood it to be. Which was a way of extensively travelling the world with no ties whilst working exclusively Online. The modern equivalent of a PADI or TEFL qualification. Surely what you are describing is a fancy term for well-paid immigrant?
It’s a visa for an immigrant that doesn’t have a job locally, but has a job elsewhere that lets him work remotely, on a decent salary.
My favourite example of which, was the Maldives resort that offered a year’s stay for $20k, in the middle of the pandemic.
Fair enough. Not much nomadic about that though.
And being pedantic, and I'm not trying to argue with you, but if said individual is resident in the UAE, and does all his work from there, in what way does he or she have a job elsewhere? That's a philosophical question I guess.
The international borders hide the fact that Moscow engages in as much imperialism inside Russia as it does with its near abroad. The Cossack-descended people in the South and the Siberians have been exploited from Stalin to Putin, just as Ukrainians and Belarusians have.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Ok, I suppose a Marxist dystopia under Corbyn is about the only yardstick by which Johnson's tenure could be judged non-disastrous. Point of order though. If Labour had won GE19 there wouldn't have been a Brexit Deal. There'd have been no Brexit.
OTOH, a Corbyn-led government would have dragged its feet over Ukraine, giving succour to others who were opposed to the war in Western Europe.
I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
At least he looks vaguely sensible and polite, and isn't an international embarrassment and global laughing stock, in the manner of his weird, warped and whackjob immediate predecessors. Does he belong in the modern Tory party?
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
Sunak should make it a vote of confidence in the government. Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
I confess it does make me warm to Sunak, a little. He looks smooth and professional. Smiling and yet firm
I doubt if it will move the polls a jot. But if he can pull it off: well done Rishi
At least he looks vaguely sensible and polite, and isn't an international embarrassment and global laughing stock, in the manner of his weird, warped and whackjob immediate predecessors. Does he belong in the modern Tory party?
I hope this is the beginning of Britain’s global rehabilitation.
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
Sunak should make it a vote of confidence in the government. Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
Politically, perhaps so, but what's the procedural route to do so? This isn't like the vote that DayTripper just alluded to whereby a vote against the government was a vote to effectively make the Leader of the Opposition PM-in-Parliament by giving him control of the Commons agenda.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Ok, I suppose a Marxist dystopia under Corbyn is about the only yardstick by which Johnson's tenure could be judged non-disastrous. Point of order though. If Labour had won GE19 there wouldn't have been a Brexit Deal. There'd have been no Brexit.
OTOH, a Corbyn-led government would have dragged its feet over Ukraine, giving succour to others who were opposed to the war in Western Europe.
Imagine if Corbyn and Trump had won. Putin would probably be about to launch his invasion of Moldova, with the Baltics next on his list.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Gill was a teetotaler due to his previous alcoholism.
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
Sunak should make it a vote of confidence in the government. Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
No. We need to move beyond the extremism (or extremist tactics) of the Brexit-Johnson era.
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
Sunak should make it a vote of confidence in the government. Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
I'd agree with that.
Let them resign now - and have by-elections. And lose the pension that they would get by losing in a General Election in a bit more than a year? Not happening.....
Labour pledges to help young people buy homes by relaxing planning rules
All parties promise this in opposition and ditch it in government when NIMBYs wear them down.
Starmer is the last person to face down determined opposition, so I imagine this proposal will face the same fate as all the previous ones.
There are fewer NIMBYS in inner city Labour heartlands than rural areas and suburban areas and commuter towns.
So Labour don't need the votes of NIMBYS as much as the Tories and LDs
I think most have continually underestimated Starmers ability to “get on” and make a impact. It’ll be the same here.
The devil will be in the details. "Protections for renters" will surely constrain rental supply - will that really be outweighed by a massive housebuilding programme - and how do people who can't afford to save for a deposit because they have to rent get to buy the new houses?
The government appears to be doing a pretty good job already of constraining rental supply, with policies around mortgage interest allowance and capital depreciation.
The answer is build more houses. Build More Houses. BUILD. LOTS. MORE. HOUSES.
Nothing else will work, except perhaps banning immigration until more houses are built.
We need immigrants to build the new houses........
Loads of industries are already heavily short of workers so can't "just raise wages".
Raise wages and let unproductive jobs that can't, die.
Given a large chunk of those jobs that we are short of are in the public sector (and possibly the new turbo charged house building too?) then that requires increasing taxes by several %. Whilst I may be in favour I know the electorate won't be and so do the politicians.
No, it requires culling unproductive jobs and letting productive ones get a higher wage.
No need to increase taxes to do that.
Or do you think the UK's public sector is emblematic of the best of productivity in recent years?
And how do you determine productive and unproductive public sector jobs? Goodness knows folk have tried. Does raising a Social Workers case load from 30 to 100 make them more or less productive?
One of the fallouts of Thatcherism is that the roles where there was money to be made from automation and reducing headcount have been privatised. The state is largely left with the roles that nobody has worked out how to do that for. And then we end up with...
Baumol’s cost disease, a bit of economics jargon that means sectors that aren’t getting more productive, often one’s involving a lot of human contact, see costs going up because they have to compete for staff against sectors that are. Of course healthcare can be made more productive through technology, and because of capital underinvestment the NHS IT systems are dire, but ultimately caring professions are just going to keep sucking up an ever greater part of our collective income.
To make it concrete, if pay goes up for other physics graduate jobs, physics teachers are likely to become more expensive, because otherwise physics teachers become physics something-else-ers. And that's true even if there's nothing you can do to make physics teachers become more productive.
Abolish national pay scales and let the market decide pay rates instead.
If physics teachers are in high demand, then pay them more. If there's an overabundance of people available to teach say English* instead, then pay them proportionately less.
Why pay English and Physics teachers the same, if they're not in the same demand and supply?
* Replace English with any other subject as appropriate, if this answer is not appropriate.
Academy chains can pay staff more than the national pay scales.
The fact they don't should tell you everything you need to know..
Oh and you could pay less but even in areas where house prices are low - many good schools can't get decent teachers at the moment because to many former teachers a job outside teaching looks far more attractive,
Key thing is that the government decides how much it is prepared to pay per pupil. And there's reasonable evidence that the amount is currently "not enough".
(And be careful what you wish for with individual schools negotiating. Leaving aside the extra work created by doing that, and the observation that some of us put a value on taking that off the table, consider what happened with train drivers. Rail unions played one firm off against another, which is one reason why train drivers are paid so much.)
Talking of which:
February ITT application stats for England are so bad that this year is now looking worse than last year, which is quite something 😲 - primary 15% lower than same time last year - secondary 2% higher despite big bursary uplifts
The bursary thing confuses me. As far as I understand it for in-demand subjects there's a bursary for teach training, but then post-training the initial pay is the same for in-demand and out of demand subjects? Or have I got that wrong.
Presumably those who are able to work for an in-demand subject are educated enough to look past the bursary alone and look at what the follow-on wage is and think that it isn't enough to tempt them?
Schools should have a per-pupil budget then spend that as they see fit. If they need to spend more to fill a Maths vacancy, than an English* vacancy, then they should have that freedom.
* Replace as appropriate.
But. If you are advocating a pure free market, then. Schools should have a per pupil budget which enables them to fill vacancies at the market rate. As I said earlier. This requires loads more cash from you. We've had a £550+ per pupil reduction this year. So. Over half the staff every day are on supply. Which is tempting everyone else onto supply. We've lost 13 permanent staff this year. Only one vacancy filled. That's a market failure.
Are supply staff cheaper?
If yes, look into why.
If no, then no the schools aren't operating on a proper per pupil budget.
Shifting staff from permanent to supply shouldn't liberate any budget, quite the opposite in fact. Supply budget should come from the exact same budget as permanent does.
Do supply teachers have todo all the tedious and unnecessary paperwork that permanent teachers are requird to do? And endless meetings? If not,that would explain why supply teaching is more popular.
We need to get rid of thisTory government and all its red tape.
@ClippP i bow to nobody in my deep loathing for the damage this government has done to education, but massive increases in red tape have been a feature of every government from at least the 1980s onwards. Be they Conservative, Labour, Coalition or Conservative.
It's not about misguided government policies so much as it is empire building by the DfE and OFSTED. To undo the damage, we would need to eliminate those.
I fear the odds of a Labour government firing large numbers of civil servants merely because they are a useless deadweight on the system is the same as the odds of Stuart Dickson speaking in praise of England.
Fair comment, of course. But who set up those dead-weight qangos in the first place? And appointed the people to head them? Usually the answer is the Conservatives, including under the Coalition Government. If you want loads of red tape, and thousands of useless jobsworths, the Conservatives are the party for you.
The details still have to come out, but if the Green Lane thing is true - no checks on anything bound for Northern Ireland from GB, that is a massive, massive win. Everything else is secondary.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Ok, I suppose a Marxist dystopia under Corbyn is about the only yardstick by which Johnson's tenure could be judged non-disastrous. Point of order though. If Labour had won GE19 there wouldn't have been a Brexit Deal. There'd have been no Brexit.
The famously enthusiastic Remainer Jeremy Corbyn would have called it off?
And a Marxist dystopia under Jeremy Corbyn is, unfortunately, the yardstick by which we must judge it. Because that was the alternative.
If I were making Johnson's case for posterity, it would be that I don't really see a credible scenario which didn't lead to a Marxist dystopia which didn't involve him and his rather half-baked deal. We can both prefer that a better deal had been in place from the start (or, for you, no deal at all), but the pathway which led to such a thing AND no Marxist dystopia was, in my view, so narrow in its likelihood as to be implausible. My view is that Johnson was the only broadly plausible way of getting from the failure of May's 2017 election to today which didn't go via Marxist dystopia.
The devil will be in the detail but it seems like today's is a sensible deal that is pretty much along the lines of what I've advocated for, for years.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
Von Der Leyen conforms the ECJ will have the final say on single market issues in Northern Ireland. Despite the new 'Stormont break' for new EU laws.
Can't see the DUP or ERG accepting those Deal. Sunak will likely need Labour votes to get it through if a vote on it
Utter nonsense
A few ERG dinosaurs may vote against but the vast majority of conservative mps will vote for it
I would not be surprised if 100 to 150 Tory MPs voted against this Deal plus all of the DUP.
He might get a majority of Tory MPs behind it but probably no more than 2/3, same as for May's Deal on MV1.
However he will get it through as Starmer is backing it while Corbyn opposed May's Deal
There will be less than 30 rebels. Tory MPs may be largely stupid, but they are not that stupid!
Sunak should make it a vote of confidence in the government. Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
Politically, perhaps so, but what's the procedural route to do so? This isn't like the vote that DayTripper just alluded to whereby a vote against the government was a vote to effectively make the Leader of the Opposition PM-in-Parliament by giving him control of the Commons agenda.
You link the vote on the deal with a vote of confidence in the government in a single motion.
The problem of course is that you will then lose the support of the Labour party on the motion.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Gill was a teetotaler due to his previous alcoholism.
Sure. And a smack addict
But nonetheless a restaurant reviewer who can’t drink wine, cocktails or a digestif? It’s like a global news reporter who can’t go to Asia, or a sports corespondent who hides when he sees excited crowds
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
I think Coren is an entitled prick. Gill’s prose was too fussy.
I can’t really think of a great British food writer out there right now, although the substack Vittles is quite interesting.
But Rayner, importantly, has very good taste and no stupid pretensions.
Labour pledges to help young people buy homes by relaxing planning rules
All parties promise this in opposition and ditch it in government when NIMBYs wear them down.
Starmer is the last person to face down determined opposition, so I imagine this proposal will face the same fate as all the previous ones.
There are fewer NIMBYS in inner city Labour heartlands than rural areas and suburban areas and commuter towns.
So Labour don't need the votes of NIMBYS as much as the Tories and LDs
I think most have continually underestimated Starmers ability to “get on” and make a impact. It’ll be the same here.
The devil will be in the details. "Protections for renters" will surely constrain rental supply - will that really be outweighed by a massive housebuilding programme - and how do people who can't afford to save for a deposit because they have to rent get to buy the new houses?
The government appears to be doing a pretty good job already of constraining rental supply, with policies around mortgage interest allowance and capital depreciation.
The answer is build more houses. Build More Houses. BUILD. LOTS. MORE. HOUSES.
Nothing else will work, except perhaps banning immigration until more houses are built.
We need immigrants to build the new houses........
Loads of industries are already heavily short of workers so can't "just raise wages".
Raise wages and let unproductive jobs that can't, die.
Given a large chunk of those jobs that we are short of are in the public sector (and possibly the new turbo charged house building too?) then that requires increasing taxes by several %. Whilst I may be in favour I know the electorate won't be and so do the politicians.
No, it requires culling unproductive jobs and letting productive ones get a higher wage.
No need to increase taxes to do that.
Or do you think the UK's public sector is emblematic of the best of productivity in recent years?
And how do you determine productive and unproductive public sector jobs? Goodness knows folk have tried. Does raising a Social Workers case load from 30 to 100 make them more or less productive?
One of the fallouts of Thatcherism is that the roles where there was money to be made from automation and reducing headcount have been privatised. The state is largely left with the roles that nobody has worked out how to do that for. And then we end up with...
Baumol’s cost disease, a bit of economics jargon that means sectors that aren’t getting more productive, often one’s involving a lot of human contact, see costs going up because they have to compete for staff against sectors that are. Of course healthcare can be made more productive through technology, and because of capital underinvestment the NHS IT systems are dire, but ultimately caring professions are just going to keep sucking up an ever greater part of our collective income.
To make it concrete, if pay goes up for other physics graduate jobs, physics teachers are likely to become more expensive, because otherwise physics teachers become physics something-else-ers. And that's true even if there's nothing you can do to make physics teachers become more productive.
Abolish national pay scales and let the market decide pay rates instead.
If physics teachers are in high demand, then pay them more. If there's an overabundance of people available to teach say English* instead, then pay them proportionately less.
Why pay English and Physics teachers the same, if they're not in the same demand and supply?
* Replace English with any other subject as appropriate, if this answer is not appropriate.
Academy chains can pay staff more than the national pay scales.
The fact they don't should tell you everything you need to know..
Oh and you could pay less but even in areas where house prices are low - many good schools can't get decent teachers at the moment because to many former teachers a job outside teaching looks far more attractive,
Key thing is that the government decides how much it is prepared to pay per pupil. And there's reasonable evidence that the amount is currently "not enough".
(And be careful what you wish for with individual schools negotiating. Leaving aside the extra work created by doing that, and the observation that some of us put a value on taking that off the table, consider what happened with train drivers. Rail unions played one firm off against another, which is one reason why train drivers are paid so much.)
Talking of which:
February ITT application stats for England are so bad that this year is now looking worse than last year, which is quite something 😲 - primary 15% lower than same time last year - secondary 2% higher despite big bursary uplifts
The bursary thing confuses me. As far as I understand it for in-demand subjects there's a bursary for teach training, but then post-training the initial pay is the same for in-demand and out of demand subjects? Or have I got that wrong.
Presumably those who are able to work for an in-demand subject are educated enough to look past the bursary alone and look at what the follow-on wage is and think that it isn't enough to tempt them?
Schools should have a per-pupil budget then spend that as they see fit. If they need to spend more to fill a Maths vacancy, than an English* vacancy, then they should have that freedom.
* Replace as appropriate.
But. If you are advocating a pure free market, then. Schools should have a per pupil budget which enables them to fill vacancies at the market rate. As I said earlier. This requires loads more cash from you. We've had a £550+ per pupil reduction this year. So. Over half the staff every day are on supply. Which is tempting everyone else onto supply. We've lost 13 permanent staff this year. Only one vacancy filled. That's a market failure.
Are supply staff cheaper?
If yes, look into why.
If no, then no the schools aren't operating on a proper per pupil budget.
Shifting staff from permanent to supply shouldn't liberate any budget, quite the opposite in fact. Supply budget should come from the exact same budget as permanent does.
Do supply teachers have todo all the tedious and unnecessary paperwork that permanent teachers are requird to do? And endless meetings? If not,that would explain why supply teaching is more popular.
We need to get rid of thisTory government and all its red tape.
@ClippP i bow to nobody in my deep loathing for the damage this government has done to education, but massive increases in red tape have been a feature of every government from at least the 1980s onwards. Be they Conservative, Labour, Coalition or Conservative.
It's not about misguided government policies so much as it is empire building by the DfE and OFSTED. To undo the damage, we would need to eliminate those.
I fear the odds of a Labour government firing large numbers of civil servants merely because they are a useless deadweight on the system is the same as the odds of Stuart Dickson speaking in praise of England.
Fair comment, of course. But who set up those dead-weight qangos in the first place? And appointed the people to head them? Usually the answer is the Conservatives, including under the Coalition Government. If you want loads of red tape, and thousands of useless jobsworths, the Conservatives are the party for you.
But that's only because since the start of the 1980s, the Conservatives (including the coalition) have been in power for nearly 70% of the time.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Ok, I suppose a Marxist dystopia under Corbyn is about the only yardstick by which Johnson's tenure could be judged non-disastrous. Point of order though. If Labour had won GE19 there wouldn't have been a Brexit Deal. There'd have been no Brexit.
OTOH, a Corbyn-led government would have dragged its feet over Ukraine, giving succour to others who were opposed to the war in Western Europe.
Imagine if Corbyn and Trump had won. Putin would probably be about to launch his invasion of Moldova, with the Baltics next on his list.
Trump would have been genuinely frightening.
We would be heading to to war involving NATO soldiers now. Trump might have been pushed into acting by the US security establishment, but weeks would have been lost when supplies were not sent to Ukraine, and when it would have been plain to the Ukrainians that the US and Western Europe weren't interested.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
I think Coren is an entitled prick. Gill’s prose was too fussy.
I can’t really think of a great British food writer out there right now, although the substack Vittles is quite interesting.
But Rayner, importantly, has very good taste and no stupid pretensions.
Try Hayward on the FT. He is the best and consistently wins all the awards for a reason
Rayner is also excellent but is unfairly hemmed in by the awful remainery puritan readership of the guardian that keep forcing him to review curry houses in Northampton
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Gill was a teetotaler due to his previous alcoholism.
Sure. And a smack addict
But nonetheless a restaurant reviewer who can’t drink wine, cocktails or a digestif? It’s like a global news reporter who can’t go to Asia, or a sports corespondent who hides when he sees excited crowds
Yes, I see that. I still enjoyed his reviews though. I believe he dictated them because he was dyslexic?
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Before 2019 somebody asked if anyone could imagine Corbyn sending soldiers to Estonia if Russia invaded.
The immortal answer provided - not by me - was, 'No. I think the Russians would probably be able to win without our help.'
Many a true word...
Found it. The question was posed by the great @AlistairMeeks and the reply was from @Pulpstar
The details still have to come out, but if the Green Lane thing is true - no checks on anything bound for Northern Ireland from GB, that is a massive, massive win. Everything else is secondary.
Let’s see the detail on that.
Personally, I am delighted by the state aid / VAT agreement as well. Those elements always struck me as a terrible surrender of sovereignty by Johnson and Frost.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
AA Gill was often asked how he stayed so thin given his job of dining in fancy restaurants. His method was to eat nothing until dinner - skipped breakfast and lunch.
Following @POTUS’s visit to Ukraine, I'm in Kyiv to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to Ukraine, discuss ways we can continue our support – including through economic assistance – and pay tribute to the bravery of the Ukrainian people a year after Russia's unprovoked invasion.
The devil will be in the detail but it seems like today's is a sensible deal that is pretty much along the lines of what I've advocated for, for years.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
For years the EU said stuff like this was impossible. The Remain-biased UK press, from the Guardian to the BBC, always took the EU's declarative statement as facts of life, while constantly scrutinizing the UK position as something to be flexed. Turns out the UK has a lot of cards to play after all.
So much of this will be about detail and what happens next. But you can say a) Sunak has got an agreement because EU leaders rate him b) he's engaged with trade offs c) he's done the work d) he deserves credit for all that e) he's taken a big gamble the politics falls into place.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
I quite like Coren. He can be funny. But Rayner writes genuinely class prose, and is more generous
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Gill was a teetotaler due to his previous alcoholism.
Sure. And a smack addict
But nonetheless a restaurant reviewer who can’t drink wine, cocktails or a digestif? It’s like a global news reporter who can’t go to Asia, or a sports corespondent who hides when he sees excited crowds
He surely must be the only restaurant reviewer to be able (at least in theory) to paint a baboon on the side of his car, alongside a row of chef's hats, to record his kills.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
AA Gill was often asked how he stayed so thin given his job of dining in fancy restaurants. His method was to eat nothing until dinner - skipped breakfast and lunch.
The Warrior Diet. I do it myself. It means you can eat what the fuck you like at dinner
It also means you stay mentally alert for much of the day
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The voters who made the lying clown our national leader did our country no favours, at all.
The alternative was Jeremy Corbyn!
And would that really have been worse than what we got?
It would have been several times worse. Quite aside from the constant background awfulness of a Corbyn-led government and the economic shambles from day one, can you imagine Corbyn in charge during either Covid or the war?
Before 2019 somebody asked if anyone could imagine Corbyn sending soldiers to Estonia if Russia invaded.
The immortal answer provided - not by me - was, 'No. I think the Russians would probably be able to win without our help.'
Many a true word...
Found it. The question was posed by the great @AlistairMeeks and the reply was from @Pulpstar
Instructive to note it only got three likes at the time whereas my reprise got 9.
Context, context...
I don't have stats, but the impression I get is that this board has got gradually freer with its likes over time. (Possibly the quality of posting has got better, or we are better-disposed to one another, or possibly we have just belatedly become habituated to the norms of social media behaviour (the same trend was apparent on facebook when people still inhabited it)). Though I didn't realise 'like' inflation was quite as great as that.
The devil will be in the detail but it seems like today's is a sensible deal that is pretty much along the lines of what I've advocated for, for years.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
For years the EU said stuff like this was impossible. The Remain-biased UK press, from the Guardian to the BBC, always took the EU's declarative statement as facts of life, while constantly scrutinizing the UK position as something to be flexed. Turns out the UK has a lot of cards to play after all.
In which case, why did it take 7 years and lots of crap to get to where we should have beren ab initio?
Too many Tories and Brexiters patting themselves on the back for clearing up the shit-heap that they themselves created. And the farmers of the DUP still have their manure-filled trailer sprayers.
I think we discussed this when it was published. I think it’s pretty well established among the think tankers commentariat now that Britain is quite uniquely fucked.
Starmer even referred to this obliquely when he noted that Poland was on course to overtake British living standards.
However, the good news, is that such a gap has developed between Britain and the “frontier” (ie USA and perhaps Northern Europe) that there is now a lot of catch up to do.
There is no essential reason why Britain should be doomed to such low living standards. Today’s agreement is an important milestone toward potential recovery.
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
AA Gill was often asked how he stayed so thin given his job of dining in fancy restaurants. His method was to eat nothing until dinner - skipped breakfast and lunch.
The Warrior Diet. I do it myself. It means you can eat what the fuck you like at dinner
It also means you stay mentally alert for much of the day
Mentally alert but also, I would guess, murderously angry. (Possibly this explains the rage in AAG's writing). There is a semi-famous stat that American judges give out notably harsher sentences if they are sentencing immediately before a meal compared to immediately after one.
I would gently suggest to all those who have underrated Sunak, suggests he hides in a fridge, or is weak have been confounded today by a grown up PM who does detail and in this agreement has achieved a legacy that will long outlast his tenure
Agreed. This gives some substance and meaning to his PMship. And the process of limiting the damage from Brexit has finally begun. Rejoin ... sorry I mean Rejoice.
I would gently suggest to all those who have underrated Sunak, suggests he hides in a fridge, or is weak have been confounded today by a grown up PM who does detail and in this agreement has achieved a legacy that will long outlast his tenure
Agreed. This gives some substance and meaning to his PMship. And the process of limiting the damage from Brexit has finally begun. Rejoin ... sorry I mean Rejoice.
Sunak clearly sees the way to growth is through resolving the NIP and much closer cooperation with the EU
No reason to believe Jay Rayner isn't in excellent mental health.
He’s a really fine writer. Not so sure about his physical condition however
On the other hand, at least he looks like he actually enjoys the food he writes about.
Never trust a thin food writer. Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
AA Gill was often asked how he stayed so thin given his job of dining in fancy restaurants. His method was to eat nothing until dinner - skipped breakfast and lunch.
The Warrior Diet. I do it myself. It means you can eat what the fuck you like at dinner
It also means you stay mentally alert for much of the day
I manage it some days but usually lapse at about four and go for the peanut butter jar with my spoon.
By the way for weight loss I recommend peanut butter and a banana. Sounds calorific but it staves off hunger for a decent length of time.
Ultra-Remainers should be wary of this deal. Because it normalizes Brexit. This is Brexit from now on. We will never rejoin, but there will be endless legal to-and-fro, as there is between Switzerland and the EU
This will cement Brexit in place
For oldsters like you and me Leon, Brexit is here to stay, and I never anticipated anything else. All today gives us is an unravelling of Johnson and Frost's Northern Ireland chaos. Hats off to Sunak and his team for that at least.
Nonetheless you will still queue with the Russians at Alicante Airport and have to wait for your passport to be stamped The Germans will be throwing their towels on the sunbeds as you are still hailing your taxi. Oh and tomatoes are still rationed at Lidl.
Passport stamps are on their way out. Around the world. All the queues will go - for everyone
As in so many fields, AI is about to render this issue irrelevant
The reality is prior to Brexit a visit to an EU or Schengen nation meant they were once already irrelevant.
And they are about to be irrelevant again
Also, with the advent of all these Digital Nomad visas a huge chunk of the Freedom of Movement angst has been removed. - again with the evolution of technology. All you need to move to Spain is a salary of about £25k a year - if self employed or working from home and so on
Yep! There’s millions of people who can now clearly work from anywhere in the knowledge economy, and there’s competition between nations to attract them. I know more than a few out here.
So many people - most? - do not begin to grasp this, and the enormous ramifications
The leaders here very much do. As do those in Portugal and Spain, where they can use good weather and low taxes to cream off the lifestyle now available to the 1%, rather than just the 0.01%.
AIUI UAE requires $5k a month salary and a letter of employment. Most digital nomads are freelancers. And on irregular incomes. That seems a pretty high bar to me.
They have visas for both. The one you mention is the ‘remote worker’ visa, aimed at people employed by a company overseas, and on their payroll.
There’s many other visa options for the self-employed working out of here. In practice, £10k gets you a company setup and three year visa for yourself and immediate family. A £250k cash property investment gets you a 5-year visa and anyone with a masters degree can sponsor themselves for a 10-year ‘golden visa’
The Spain and Portugual ‘digital nomad’ visas are also for those in employment with a regular salary, from an overseas company.
But. Isn't the purpose of being a "digital nomad", to be nomadic? Those options seem much better suited to those planning a significant period of residency.
Which is what they’re trying to encourage, people seeing the UAE as a place to settle and but property, rather than just a place you work for a few years, saving money that ends up overseas. The ‘digital nomad’ is something quite specific, someone who wants a residency, but works for an overseas company and draws a salary (of more than $60k).
Ah OK. That's different from the kind of thing I understood it to be. Which was a way of extensively travelling the world with no ties whilst working exclusively Online. The modern equivalent of a PADI or TEFL qualification. Surely what you are describing is a fancy term for well-paid immigrant?
It’s a visa for an immigrant that doesn’t have a job locally, but has a job elsewhere that lets him work remotely, on a decent salary.
My favourite example of which, was the Maldives resort that offered a year’s stay for $20k, in the middle of the pandemic.
Fair enough. Not much nomadic about that though.
And being pedantic, and I'm not trying to argue with you, but if said individual is resident in the UAE, and does all his work from there, in what way does he or she have a job elsewhere? That's a philosophical question I guess.
For example, a software developer in London is offered the chance to work remotely. He can now work from London, or Cornwall, or Lisbon, or Dubai. They remain on the payroll of the London company, so if they live in Dubai they’re not employed by a company in Dubai, which would previously have been a requirement for a resident’s visa in the UAE. One can’t rent or buy property, buy a car, send kids to school etc out here, without a resident’s visa. If he lives in Dubai with his family, and doesn’t spend more than 90 days a year in the UK, he can claim back the income tax he paid in the UK, as a foreign resident.
Leaving aside that living standards were around half what they are now, Northern Ireland was suffering a civil war, South East Asia and Africa were falling to Communism, industrial conflict was routine, and inflation was twice the current level.
"Apart from that, Mrs, Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
The details still have to come out, but if the Green Lane thing is true - no checks on anything bound for Northern Ireland from GB, that is a massive, massive win. Everything else is secondary.
Let’s see the detail on that.
Personally, I am delighted by the state aid / VAT agreement as well. Those elements always struck me as a terrible surrender of sovereignty by Johnson and Frost.
Yep. All they cared about was getting a deal - any deal - for the election. Would have signed anything, and pretty much did.
It's hard to disagree with this. I am precisely the kind of person who has benefited from the economic reforms of the 1980s, and even I can see that they have been a disaster for most people. We are in a massive hole right now, as a country. I genuinely fear that we won't be able to dig ourselves out of it, and could turn into the Argentina of the twenty-first century. Brexit is only part of it.
Three big wins coming out so far. Things the EU previously said were impossible.
1) A green lane with no checks for anything going to Northern Ireland
2) Availability of all GB foods, agriculture and medicine to Northern Ireland
3) A break from Stormont on EU laws (this could get downgraded to half a win depending on whether it only applies to new laws)
Then one potential win for the EU, unclear its size until more comes out:
1) Some EU law applying in NI, with ECJ decision maker.
We need to find out more, but right now seems like a 3-1 win for the UK.
That depends on what you believe the EU is trying to do. If it can monitor use of the Green lanes to ensure that there is no subsequent movement into the Single Market and that goods stay in Northern Ireland - and it can through access to UK data records which the deal has made available - then it is protecting the integrity of the single market and so also winning.
All it took was grown-ups on both sides of the negotiating table.
The devil will be in the detail but it seems like today's is a sensible deal that is pretty much along the lines of what I've advocated for, for years.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
For years the EU said stuff like this was impossible. The Remain-biased UK press, from the Guardian to the BBC, always took the EU's declarative statement as facts of life, while constantly scrutinizing the UK position as something to be flexed. Turns out the UK has a lot of cards to play after all.
In which case, why did it take 7 years and lots of crap to get to where we should have beren ab initio?
Too many Tories and Brexiters patting themselves on the back for clearing up the shit-heap that they themselves created. And the farmers of the DUP still have their manure-filled trailer sprayers.
Initially, the EU throwing a fit of pique over people daring to leave their club. They could have easily offered this to May. Then it was followed by incompetents on the UK side (Johnson, Truss).
And Northern Ireland was a problem affecting 1.5 million people out of 65 million. The whole UK can now benefit from future trade deals with the US, CPTPP and others, while maintaining EU trade. Assuming Keir Starmer's Europhilia doesn't mothball them.
The best restaurant reviewer IN THE WORLD is of course Tim Hayward on The FT. He’s the James Joyce of restaurant critics, with a dashi of Proust
Talking of matters gastronomical, on Friday I ate at the Parkers Arms, Newton-in-Bowland, recently awarded the accolade of best gastropub in the country. I would describe the food as 'nice'. No doubt Jay Rayner or AA Gill could describe it better. It was also not exorbitantly priced.
If you were to subject yourself to a few days foodie break, you could do a lot worse than North Lancashire. Really, really good food is surprisingly thick on the ground given the centres of population within half an hour's drive are basically Clitheroe, Blackburn and Great Harwood.
If those numbers are a true sample of Russian casuistries, some regions are approaching a 1% population loss!
Almost entirely of young men of procreation age. Will hammer fertility rates.
And rather tends towards the idea that Russia doesn’t have “unlimited” man power to burn. If Putin can only get away with conscripting from the periphery, then the pool is much, much smaller.
Report from the EU that Boris Johnson and Frost grated in the EU who welcome the new PM pragmatic attitude
No surprise there
The Johnson/Frost spin will no doubt be a deal was only possible because they scared the EU rigid with their hardball Protocol Cancellation bill. Nothing at all to do with us dropping the macho theatrics and behaving like mature adults.
But that will not wash. The current, grown-up UK government has made the legal advice clear: the bill was never going to work from a legal standpoint and would have exposed the UK to large compensation payments if enacted. And if the UK government knew that, the EU did too.
Course it won't. But they deal in fantasies. What this actually shows imo is the wasted opportunity to negotiate a better deal in the first place. All it needed was good faith, hard work, focus and professionalism. Instead we got all that 'No Deal is better than a Bad Deal' and 'holding all the cards' perpetual grandstanding nonsense. Then a mad rush to sign something - anything - so Johnson could win his election.
You can't go into a negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal, even if that's what you privately believe. And if the alternative is a Corbyn government, a deal held together with string and wishful thinking is better than whatever deal Corbyn would have cooked up. Imagine Corbyn trying to find a deal with the EU which could keep NI within the UK. It would be like all of his Christmasses had come at once (well, two of his Christmasses.)
Johnson and Frost may not have gone into negotiation with the position that a bad deal is better than no deal but they came out of it in that position. Which comes to the same thing.
It looks like Sunak is making that bad deal workable. Kudos. It's more than Johnson ever did.
Steve Baker giving full throated support on BBC News. Thinks the deal good enough for reasonable unionists.
It was Truss who appointed Baker, Heaton-Harris and Cleverly to sort the NI protocol out. Her plan is why the ERG wanted Truss rather than Sunak. So the ERG has been the architects of this and it is therefore perplexing that the "mad-ERGers will rebel" narrative took hold.
Might I suggest that Truss may end up with some credit for this along with Sunak?
I asked Heaton-Harris what his message was to fellow Brexiteers as he came out of the press conference: 'That this is a really good deal'. Baker also said it was a 'fantastic idea' > We've had the PM/UVDL framing now the Q is what does the detail look like 1/ https://twitter.com/bethrigby/status/1630249157423403008
The devil will be in the detail but it seems like today's is a sensible deal that is pretty much along the lines of what I've advocated for, for years.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
For years the EU said stuff like this was impossible. The Remain-biased UK press, from the Guardian to the BBC, always took the EU's declarative statement as facts of life, while constantly scrutinizing the UK position as something to be flexed. Turns out the UK has a lot of cards to play after all.
In which case, why did it take 7 years and lots of crap to get to where we should have beren ab initio?
Too many Tories and Brexiters patting themselves on the back for clearing up the shit-heap that they themselves created. And the farmers of the DUP still have their manure-filled trailer sprayers.
Because the EU spent nearly all that time in "punish the renegade province" mode.
Comments
Afterall, it should always have been dealt with afterwards. Putting the public finances cart before the GFC horse was what would have made Blair much less electorally successful. Plus it gave Osborne something to do in the days when he had nineteen fewer jobs than now.
Jesus wept. So @lornaslater knows her Deposit Return Scheme needs a UKIMA exemption; doesn’t have one; hasn’t even applied for one; yet demands businesses sign up to the scheme *by tomorrow*? This is clown car stuff.
https://twitter.com/roddyqc/status/1630195417475436546
My favourite example of which, was the Maldives resort that offered a year’s stay for $20k, in the middle of the pandemic.
Labour overspent from 2002 onwards. Hence my vote in 2005, hence running out of money in 2007. Only if you are stupid and pathetic enough to argue that Crises has been abolished could you think otherwise. You're not that stupid, so I can only think you're being deliberately disingenuous and pigheaded.
https://twitter.com/Roger_Moorhouse/status/1630237930257256448?s=20
How long until the SNP leadership candidates say they would like to adopt the same type of principles in the event of leaving the UK and re-joining the EU?
And I say this even though I don't have a view on the deal yet. Its great politics, let us see if it is good policy.
The problem with dealing with the EU - whether as a member or an outsider - is that you are not dealing with a single institution arguing in the interests of its citizens but a vast sprawling entity whose constituent factions all have different and competing interests, only some of which relate to the interests of the people they purport to represent.
While there are obviously deals to be made which would be in the interests of both British people and EU citizens, that doesn't necessarily mean those deals will be reached. Possibly someone the Portuguese will be in dispute with the Spanish on matters of energy, or the EU judiciary will have fallen out with the Polish, or possibly someone will identify an opportunity to wheedle out some extra funding, or someone will need a battle cry for an election, or potentially just plain old spite may come into it, or any one of a hundred other seemingly unrelated issues may come into play.
And still no income tax.
Not much nomadic about that though.
And being pedantic, and I'm not trying to argue with you, but if said individual is resident in the UAE, and does all his work from there, in what way does he or she have a job elsewhere?
That's a philosophical question I guess.
Never trust a thin food writer.
Like Giles Coren or perhaps others closer to home.
Vote against and you lose the whip and the right to stand as a Conservative at the next election.
AA Gill was a weird one. Extremely acute, with a great gift for sentences, yet always a little too nasty. Like he was eaten up inside. His eventual death from stomach cancer was Dantean. Also a teetotaler. I do not trust teetotal restaurant reviewers
Let them resign now - and have by-elections. And lose the pension that they would get by losing in a General Election in a bit more than a year? Not happening.....
Surely equities - and house prices - can only go one way?
And a Marxist dystopia under Jeremy Corbyn is, unfortunately, the yardstick by which we must judge it. Because that was the alternative.
If I were making Johnson's case for posterity, it would be that I don't really see a credible scenario which didn't lead to a Marxist dystopia which didn't involve him and his rather half-baked deal. We can both prefer that a better deal had been in place from the start (or, for you, no deal at all), but the pathway which led to such a thing AND no Marxist dystopia was, in my view, so narrow in its likelihood as to be implausible.
My view is that Johnson was the only broadly plausible way of getting from the failure of May's 2017 election to today which didn't go via Marxist dystopia.
If so, RIP to those who for years denounced what has just been announced as a "unicorn", it seems from the announcement that unicorns are alive and well.
Compromise was the nature of the Good Friday Agreement, and compromise seems to have happened here.
Hopefully this satisfies the DUP and we can all move on now. If it doesn't, we need to go back to negotiations.
The problem of course is that you will then lose the support of the Labour party on the motion.
The new "Stormont break" will actually allow the NI Assembly to prevent the application of new EU laws. [in NI]
That goes further than many were expecting, and may meet one of the DUP's toughest tests.
Wow. It seems to go even further. VdL said that the new "Stormont break" is based around the "petition of concern"
To non-Stormont nerds, that's a mechanism that allows just 30 MLAs to block legislation.
So it’s an effective unionist (or nationalist) veto over new EU laws. Huge.
Of course, the caveat is that for such a veto to be exercised, Stormont would need to be sitting.
Which you might say is a decent incentive to get the thing back up and running...
https://twitter.com/mattuthompson/status/1630240436106444802?s=20
But nonetheless a restaurant reviewer who can’t drink wine, cocktails or a digestif? It’s like a global news reporter who can’t go to Asia, or a sports corespondent who hides when he sees excited crowds
Gill’s prose was too fussy.
I can’t really think of a great British food writer out there right now, although the substack Vittles is quite interesting.
But Rayner, importantly, has very good taste and no stupid pretensions.
We would be heading to to war involving NATO soldiers now. Trump might have been pushed into acting by the US security establishment, but weeks would have been lost when supplies were not sent to Ukraine, and when it would have been plain to the Ukrainians that the US and Western Europe weren't interested.
Rayner is also excellent but is unfairly hemmed in by the awful remainery puritan readership of the guardian that keep forcing him to review curry houses in Northampton
1) A green lane with no checks for anything going to Northern Ireland
2) Availability of all GB foods, agriculture and medicine to Northern Ireland
3) A break from Stormont on EU laws (this could get downgraded to half a win depending on whether it only applies to new laws)
Then one potential win for the EU, unclear its size until more comes out:
1) Some EU law applying in NI, with ECJ decision maker.
We need to find out more, but right now seems like a 3-1 win for the UK.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/2413837/#Comment_2413837
Instructive to note it only got three likes at the time whereas my reprise got 9.
Context, context...
Personally, I am delighted by the state aid / VAT agreement as well. Those elements always struck me as a terrible surrender of sovereignty by Johnson and Frost.
https://twitter.com/SecYellen/status/1630242206908030977?s=20
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1630245292019953664?s=20
Here’s to “girly swots”!
The single market is a EU construct, and it would be odd if the EU gave up the right to arbitrate around it.
The mechanisms agreed to make that arbitration quite exceptional, and subject to a measure of local control, are excellent.
(Important to add I am merely responding to the reporting).
Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands
Things weren’t nearly this bad in the 1970s—but the country’s leaders haven't grasped that yet.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/03/britain-worse-off-1970s/
It also means you stay mentally alert for much of the day
Too many Tories and Brexiters patting themselves on the back for clearing up the shit-heap that they themselves created. And the farmers of the DUP still have their manure-filled trailer sprayers.
Starmer even referred to this obliquely when he noted that Poland was on course to overtake British living standards.
However, the good news, is that such a gap has developed between Britain and the “frontier” (ie USA and perhaps Northern Europe) that there is now a lot of catch up to do.
There is no essential reason why Britain should be doomed to such low living standards. Today’s agreement is an important milestone toward potential recovery.
There is a semi-famous stat that American judges give out notably harsher sentences if they are sentencing immediately before a meal compared to immediately after one.
By the way for weight loss I recommend peanut butter and a banana. Sounds calorific but it staves off hunger for a decent length of time.
"Apart from that, Mrs, Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
All it took was grown-ups on both sides of the negotiating table.
And Northern Ireland was a problem affecting 1.5 million people out of 65 million. The whole UK can now benefit from future trade deals with the US, CPTPP and others, while maintaining EU trade. Assuming Keir Starmer's Europhilia doesn't mothball them.
It was also not exorbitantly priced.
If you were to subject yourself to a few days foodie break, you could do a lot worse than North Lancashire. Really, really good food is surprisingly thick on the ground given the centres of population within half an hour's drive are basically Clitheroe, Blackburn and Great Harwood.
It looks like Sunak is making that bad deal workable. Kudos. It's more than Johnson ever did.
Might I suggest that Truss may end up with some credit for this along with Sunak?
https://twitter.com/bethrigby/status/1630249157423403008
In any case, what's he think about the Deal?
https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1630250882544615426?s=20