Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Inflation targeting is a monetary policy regime that works fine all over the world, and the UK had adopted it prior to Labour coming into office. Brown simply removed political interference from setting interest rates. House prices went up because of supply and demand imbalances, largely - I would blame Labour along with Tory governments since the 1980s for not building enough homes. To the extent that monetary policy was to blame, it was because it was so successful at lowering inflation that interest rates came down, making mortgage payments more affordable. What you are saying is that you think rates should have been higher, even if that meant slower growth, higher unemployment and deflation in the CPI. I am not sure that would have been a better outcome.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Abolishing boom and bust came from sidestepping European recessions of 2000 and 2001 using counter-cyclical spending. Hubris, yes, but again largely irrelevant to the GFC.
However, the house price boom, and associated dodgy lending, ought to have been a red light.
A red light for what? Britain's house price boom might have been a real problem but is irrelevant to the GFC.
[both were enabled by the creation of new trading instruments that failed unexpectedly]
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
"as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction" They might not increase consumption to spite the west, but with lower demand from the West it makes fossil fuels financially more attractive. This results in an economic incentive for other countries to increase consumption.
I do agree that unilateral action has little impact on global CO2 unless it can be used to persuade other countries to do likewise.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
LOL Interesting development. Could the Privileges Committee be made subject to court challenge - a Judicial Review - on its procedural irregularities? Parliament is above the law thanks to the 1689 Bill of Rights; but surely common law rights still apply?
Sounds very Freemen of the Land kind of stuff. They seem to love declaring the supremacy of the 'Common Law'.
While I hope this is nonsense, we may need to wait and see. In the Miller prorogation case it was widely assumed and lower courts decided that the matter was not justiciable. (This included a court consisting of the LCJ, the MR and President of QBD).
It is unlikely but not impossible that a court could intervene on a committee of the HoC and its actions. Though common sense suggests it won't be interested. But, for the moment, if the SC says a matter is justiciable (ie courts can take an interest) then it is.
It is even thinkable that the courts in extremis will decide that an Act of Parliament is justiciable in itself. It's a nuclear option against tyranny never to be used, but not legally impossible, since the SC can overrule itself.
The prorogation case, of course, was about the powers of the Government, not of Parliament. I can't see a case against the Privileges Committee going anywhere because the Privileges Committee decides nothing. The House decides, and the House voted last night. The courts aren't going to overturn a vote in the Commons, especially not one whose only actual effect is to take Johnson's pass away.
Yes. I think this is correct until it isn't (hopefully never).
See this from para 70 Lady Hale in Miller:
Unless there is some Parliamentary rule to the contrary of which we are unaware, the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker can take immediate steps to enable each House to meet as soon as possible to decide upon a way forward. That would, of course, be a proceeding in Parliament which could not be called in question in this or any other court.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
You have shifted the argument. Nico679 said "I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. " which was the case earlier in the thread.
Putting out a fire that you are in part responsible for is not praiseworthy.
Criticising someone for putting out a fire is also not praiseworthy, whoever started the fire.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
... but which began under Major?
It did but it expanded hugely in the Labour years. Even though the NAO was regularly pointing out what poor value it was.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
You have shifted the argument. Nico679 said "I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. " which was the case earlier in the thread.
Putting out a fire that you are in part responsible for is not praiseworthy.
Criticising someone for putting out a fire is also not praiseworthy, whoever started the fire.
We had someone at our local allotments who always seemed to be on site to report fires, help put them out, or call the fire brigade.
Strangely enough we haven't had any fires since they disappeared.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
I wonder how many people get their Climate views from the Sun? Hopefully not too many.
You mean "phew, what a scorcher" wasn't a scientific analysis.
Although come to think of it that might have been a headline about a twenty-something Gail Porter rather than a heatwave.
The Express, on the other hand always predicts a scorching heatwave or big freeze as clickbait in the belief that every now and then they might be right, and that when they are wrong (most of the time) their goldfish brained readership (many HYUFDs) will have forgotten completely.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
As I have said in the past. Brown was a great PM and a bad CoE. Part of his greatness as PM was his ability to clean up the mess caused by his decisions as CoE. Although to be fair he also deserves credit for cleaning up the messes caused by other countries' CoEs, so there's that
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Inflation targeting is a monetary policy regime that works fine all over the world, and the UK had adopted it prior to Labour coming into office. Brown simply removed political interference from setting interest rates. House prices went up because of supply and demand imbalances, largely - I would blame Labour along with Tory governments since the 1980s for not building enough homes. To the extent that monetary policy was to blame, it was because it was so successful at lowering inflation that interest rates came down, making mortgage payments more affordable. What you are saying is that you think rates should have been higher, even if that meant slower growth, higher unemployment and deflation in the CPI. I am not sure that would have been a better outcome.
Per capita growth trended down throughout Brown's period in Number 11. The growth in the headline GDP figure that we saw under New Labour was massaged by unsustainable debt and mass immigration. That's why we have been stagnant since the financial crisis.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
I wonder how many people get their Climate views from the Sun? Hopefully not too many.
You mean "phew, what a scorcher" wasn't a scientific analysis.
Although come to think of it that might have been a headline about a twenty-something Gail Porter rather than a heatwave.
The Express, on the other hand always predicts a scorching heatwave or big freeze as clickbait in the belief that every now and then they might be right, and that when they are wrong (most of the time) their goldfish brained readership (many HYUFDs) will have forgotten completely.
their goldfish brained readership (many HYUFDs) will have forgotten completely. will blame the Met Office for being rubbish, even though the "forecast" was only dreamt up by some charlatans.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 54m The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos.
A decent-sized run on the banks would bankrupt big ones and "chaos" is too mild a word for what might well happen then.
Banks have been in disrepute among most of the population in Britain for 15 years now. This and the decline in tobacco smoking have been among the very few positive developments in the country.
Unfortunately the same can't be said about the reputation of insurers, solicitors, and medics. People continue to buy insurance policies they don't need, not noticing for example that few houses nowadays burn down or collapse into sinkholes. They still hire solicitors unnecessarily, for example to "help" them with inheritance matters or with conveyancing, although there isn't quite so much timeshare scamming as there used to be. They also continue to defer to medics, even though one or two medics in every given area have a few things said about them that circulate. But then again the whole f*cking media is full of "experts" saying this and "experts" saying that - often referred to as "experts" without being identified, which is new. People can't have much of a problem with it because if it made them feel sick they'd stop visiting the websites or reading the newspapers and as a result advertising revenue would plummet.
Bankers' reputations could fall much further though, it's true. Hopefully what people think about those leeches will translate into actions that they take. It could all happen very fast. Indeed if it happens at all, its got to. I'm always up for a good run on the banks. It's surely got to be one of the ideas that counter-"disinformation" bods or those who have counter-"disinformation" responsibilities watch out for.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
Did the phrase "lock them in a mental hospital" eventuate at any point during the conversation?
No - why should it?
My friend isn't insane, himself. Teenage girls are often a mess of hormones, worries and fears about life, the universe and everything.
Help as much as you can (the prejudice against seeing a shrink is stupid) and try and stay calm is simply good parenting.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
The important bit there was the combination of "investing in shrinks" and letting her work it out. While not doing anything permanent. Because teenagers change their minds more often than the weather changes during a cricket match on a Bank Holiday.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
My thoughts entirely. They have swallowed Brown's own spin. Gordon's only virtue in retrospect was that he was less dishonest than Johnson. He was/is an extremely vain man with nothing to be vain about. He hubristically surfed a wave largely driven by Chinese growth, pretended the extension of the economic cycle was all down to his good economic management and then claimed to have "saved the world" when the storm had passed. What a twat.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 54m The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
... but which began under Major?
It did but it expanded hugely in the Labour years. Even though the NAO was regularly pointing out what poor value it was.
Was’t PFI one of the few areas that the Tories were in accord with Labour? In fact I distinctly remember the then leader of the SCons, David Mcletchie, criticising the SG for not adopting PFI more quickly and enthusiastically. Given what we’re still lumbered with, thank feck they weren’t more enthusiastic.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
As far as I'm aware, that's not even close to what happens in the general case of such self-identification. I'm only talking about patients who already reside in the said mental hospital. To be clear: it's only for patients who have already been diagnosed as mentally ill, and it doesn't specialise in any particular mental illness, other than insofar as all the patients have been deemed to need residential care. It doesn't specialise in gender identification issues.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
We have different definitions of “continued enthusiastically”. The decreasing trend that started in 2007 continued between 2010-15.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
As I have said in the past. Brown was a great PM and a bad CoE. Part of his greatness as PM was his ability to clean up the mess caused by his decisions as CoE. Although to be fair he also deserves credit for cleaning up the messes caused by other countries' CoEs, so there's that
Yep - overrated CoE, underrated PM. You and me against the world.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Yes, but sorry to break it to you, but podgy Kier will be worse. Unlike Sunak, he knows fuck all about business and he has failed (unlike Blair) to make up for that massive deficit by surrounding himself with people that do. I hope I am wrong, but I expect to see the economy improve a little on the optimism of a change of government but then for it to tank under the mismanagement of people that have even less understanding of how an economy and business works that Peppa Pig Boy and Lizzy Lightweight combined.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Tbh I don’t see the electoral downside of Sunak taking on the Turnip Taliban, but then I’m not a Tory. I wonder if losing to Truss (and by implication a lettuce) has scarred him? I can imagine how it might fester.
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Abolishing boom and bust came from sidestepping European recessions of 2000 and 2001 using counter-cyclical spending. Hubris, yes, but again largely irrelevant to the GFC.
It also came with, in 2007 after a decade and a half of continual growth, a government that was running a budget deficit despite putting so much capital expenditure on the newer-never that was PFI.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Inflation targeting is a monetary policy regime that works fine all over the world, and the UK had adopted it prior to Labour coming into office. Brown simply removed political interference from setting interest rates. House prices went up because of supply and demand imbalances, largely - I would blame Labour along with Tory governments since the 1980s for not building enough homes. To the extent that monetary policy was to blame, it was because it was so successful at lowering inflation that interest rates came down, making mortgage payments more affordable. What you are saying is that you think rates should have been higher, even if that meant slower growth, higher unemployment and deflation in the CPI. I am not sure that would have been a better outcome.
Per capita growth trended down throughout Brown's period in Number 11. The growth in the headline GDP figure that we saw under New Labour was massaged by unsustainable debt and mass immigration. That's why we have been stagnant since the financial crisis.
Per capita GDP growth has been trending down since the 1970s. We've been stagnant since the financial crisis because the Tories have followed a series of dumb policies, like self-defeating austerity, failing to prepare for a pandemic and the grade A idiocy of Brexit. Gordon Brown really haunts Tories' dreams, he's the bogeyman who somehow still dictates our economic destiny 13 years after leaving office. (Surely by the same logic you can't blame him for anything he did during the 13 years of Labour rule, because that must have all been down to the previous government, right? Or am I mad to expect consistency or economic logic from this tendency?)
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
You have shifted the argument. Nico679 said "I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. " which was the case earlier in the thread.
Putting out a fire that you are in part responsible for is not praiseworthy.
Criticising someone for putting out a fire is also not praiseworthy, whoever started the fire.
I don't think that was the criticism. Also I think there are many other players who might be able lay claim to that. Brown and his apologists desperately want that to be the focus of his legacy even though he was only a part of the solution. To continue the fire analogy, it is like an arsonist standing before the judge and blubbing that as he helped put out the fire he should actually be given a reward rather than a prison sentence even though he started it in the first place
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
No I understood the point (and the references) but I'm thinking that the whole approach may be flawed. If teenage trans self-identification is a fad and fancy of people finding puberty traumatic, then the best approach may not be to lock them in a mental hospital and subject them to a barrage of tests to find out what's really wrong, it may simply be to ignore them and let them grow out of it by themselves. It would certainly be more cost effective and - as you note - would not end up with mental hospitals being increasingly filled with non-binary teens.
Somebody once said that the reason why the GP system survives is that it gives people somebody sympathetic to talk to, and anything serious is diverted to proper doctors. A similar system seems to be evolving here.
[Edit: I seem to have conflated two posts, one by @Westie , one by @Cyclefree . Apologies, although I think my point still holds]
The real problems, as we have seen, occur when the children are indulged unquestioningly in their ‘identity’, by the educational and medical system, and not allowed the chance to simply grow out of it.
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
It has been dyed a couple of times to try to stop people swimming in it. It has the pH of a fairly strong bleach solution - seriously harmful to swim in it.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
As far as I'm aware, that's not even close to what happens in the general case of such self-identification. I'm only talking about patients who already reside in the said mental hospital. To be clear: it's only for patients who have already been diagnosed as mentally ill, and it doesn't specialise in any particular mental illness, other than insofar as all the patients have been deemed to need residential care. It doesn't specialise in gender identification issues.
Acknowledged, but your explanation may be incomplete. What were the symptoms (other than the identification) that led them to be diagnosed as mentally ill?
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
As I have said in the past. Brown was a great PM and a bad CoE. Part of his greatness as PM was his ability to clean up the mess caused by his decisions as CoE. Although to be fair he also deserves credit for cleaning up the messes caused by other countries' CoEs, so there's that
Yep - overrated CoE, underrated PM. You and me against the world.
Your confirmation biases are as bad as any that HYUFD has for Boris Johnson
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
You have shifted the argument. Nico679 said "I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. " which was the case earlier in the thread.
Putting out a fire that you are in part responsible for is not praiseworthy.
Criticising someone for putting out a fire is also not praiseworthy, whoever started the fire.
We had someone at our local allotments who always seemed to be on site to report fires, help put them out, or call the fire brigade.
Strangely enough we haven't had any fires since they disappeared.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
My thoughts entirely. They have swallowed Brown's own spin. Gordon's only virtue in retrospect was that he was less dishonest than Johnson. He was/is an extremely vain man with nothing to be vain about. He hubristically surfed a wave largely driven by Chinese growth, pretended the extension of the economic cycle was all down to his good economic management and then claimed to have "saved the world" when the storm had passed. What a twat.
Funny how this Chinese growth did not prevent European recessions which Britain, under Brown, did avoid. The problem is not Brown's spin, it is that his detractors swallowed George Osborne's spin for the 2010 election.
On topic, no it was not a mistake. Nor would voting in favour have been a mistake either. It was irrelevant either way. All but six Tory MPs either voted in favour of the report, or abstained to let the report be accepted.
Some people have been acting crazy here acting like anyone who abstained was like Trumpists storming the Capitol on 6 January. In our adversarial Parliamentary system if people from one party abstain while the opposition is voting then that's effectively siding with the opposition by stepping out of their way and letting them win by default.
The number that matters is how many voted against and that was a pathetic, meagre 7.
7 oddballs within a Government is nothing and is perfectly manageable in any party except one as small as the Lib Dems.
I don't think it is on par with that, but I do think it is a sign of weakness. When there was such an overwhelming vote against Johnson in the end, not attending the vote sends a message all of it's own. If they wanted to defend him they should have been there and made that argument, if they wanted to condemn him the same, and if they truly thought abstention was the right position they should have defended that. Just not attending is cowardly. And it is even more so for the PM, who has little political capital as it is. This won't appease the public, they either don't care or have a firm view, this won't appease the house, because he didn't really explain himself, and it almost certainly didn't appease his backbenchers, who are split on the issue and probably could have done with some leadership.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Sunak was right. I can see how it looks cowardly, and it was my initial gut reaction, but I think this was actually more of a slight against Johnsonism. Think of it this way: a free vote and holders of the Great Offices don't even bother to turn up and lead the charge, and it's still a crushing defeat for Johnson. It's an attempt to say "he's gone, finished, irrelevant, and we don't even have to wheel in the big guns."
It's not a siege against a holdout fortress, it's just going around the smoky battlefield bayoneting the dying of the defeated army.
Well that's the theory. Whether it works in practice, we'll see. But I think I see where Sunak's coming from.
It's a lovely theory, but doesn't square with the evidence of ministers briefing about 'longstanding prior engagements', and 'I abstained because 30 days seemed an excessive punishment', etc.
An organised no show might have been precisely what you describe. What seems to be the reality is a bunch of disorganised, rather craven individuals carefully avoided making a stand.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
There you go again with your pesky facts. Remember - Gordon Brown made the cows' milk run dry with the evil power of his eye. He made the women of the village barren. He sold our gold to illegal immigrants. He spent so much on Sure Start that it made Lehmann Brothers explode. If you don't pray to St Rishi his great clunking fist will haunt your dreams forever. Only by burning Gordon Brown in a giant wicker statue of Nigel Lawson on the playing fields of Eton will our country be cleansed and purified and run once more with milk and honey.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Yes, but sorry to break it to you, but podgy Kier will be worse. Unlike Sunak, he knows fuck all about business and he has failed (unlike Blair) to make up for that massive deficit by surrounding himself with people that do. I hope I am wrong, but I expect to see the economy improve a little on the optimism of a change of government but then for it to tank under the mismanagement of people that have even less understanding of how an economy and business works that Peppa Pig Boy and Lizzy Lightweight combined.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Yes, but sorry to break it to you, but podgy Kier will be worse. Unlike Sunak, he knows fuck all about business and he has failed (unlike Blair) to make up for that massive deficit by surrounding himself with people that do. I hope I am wrong, but I expect to see the economy improve a little on the optimism of a change of government but then for it to tank under the mismanagement of people that have even less understanding of how an economy and business works that Peppa Pig Boy and Lizzy Lightweight combined.
I'm not sure of the answer myself, but it is legitimate to challenge your post by asking who you think is serious and who you think is unserious in the Labour ranks or what, amongst the trickle of policy announcements, you regard as serious or unserious? Show your workings.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
As I have said in the past. Brown was a great PM and a bad CoE. Part of his greatness as PM was his ability to clean up the mess caused by his decisions as CoE. Although to be fair he also deserves credit for cleaning up the messes caused by other countries' CoEs, so there's that
Yep - overrated CoE, underrated PM. You and me against the world.
Your confirmation biases are as bad as any that HYUFD has for Boris Johnson
No, that's a free thinking, contra consensus take I've just given there, Nigel. Just me and old Viewcode.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
There you go again with your pesky facts. Remember - Gordon Brown made the cows' milk run dry with the evil power of his eye. He made the women of the village barren. He sold our gold to illegal immigrants. He spent so much on Sure Start that it made Lehmann Brothers explode. If you don't pray to St Rishi his great clunking fist will haunt your dreams forever. Only by burning Gordon Brown in a giant wicker statue of Nigel Lawson on the playing fields of Eton will our country be cleansed and purified and run once more with milk and honey.
He did send Ed Balls out to say that anyone worrying about the stability of the derivatives market was Talking Britain Down.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Well, the expert chap told him (a) not to worry, (b) predicted the end result.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
As another tool in the toolbox, it's fine.
As either something which takes the place of government investment in capital projects, or (see Brown) as a dodge for keeping spending off the government balance sheet, it has been fairly disastrous.
One of the biggest mistakes government has made over the last couple of decades is to fail to take much advantage of an historically extremely low cost of government borrowing to invest in large public infrastructure projects likely to see a decent economic return.
The interminable delays on deciding whether or not to proceed with new nuclear, of build HS2, or a new trans-Pennine line are good examples of that. One could in the same manner argue that renationalising water on money borrowed at 1-2% would have amounted to playing the private equity predators at their own game.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
My thoughts entirely. They have swallowed Brown's own spin. Gordon's only virtue in retrospect was that he was less dishonest than Johnson. He was/is an extremely vain man with nothing to be vain about. He hubristically surfed a wave largely driven by Chinese growth, pretended the extension of the economic cycle was all down to his good economic management and then claimed to have "saved the world" when the storm had passed. What a twat.
Funny how this Chinese growth did not prevent European recessions which Britain, under Brown, did avoid. The problem is not Brown's spin, it is that his detractors swallowed George Osborne's spin for the 2010 election.
The IFS disagrees. Labour's splurging of money on public sector (much of which syphoned off in wage and pension benefits) was suggested by them to have been profligate as far back as 2001.
Is my view confirmation bias or yours the same? Who knows. All I can tell you (to apply a little balance) is that even as someone who is right of centre I would say that the Blair government was a much better period than the Johnson one.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
I would give Brown a very partial pass on regulation. He aimed to reduce the risk and thought he had. I think that better than his predecessors who didn't even try.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Well, the expert chap told him (a) not to worry, (b) predicted the end result.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
The tripartite system introduced additional risk by creating siloes without proper political accountability for the big picture.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Well, the expert chap told him (a) not to worry, (b) predicted the end result.
Which seems pretty fair.
Well it is his money.
As he put it, talking to the Top Chap cost about as much as moderately serious service for a car. Which do you love more - child or car?
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Inflation targeting is a monetary policy regime that works fine all over the world, and the UK had adopted it prior to Labour coming into office. Brown simply removed political interference from setting interest rates. House prices went up because of supply and demand imbalances, largely - I would blame Labour along with Tory governments since the 1980s for not building enough homes. To the extent that monetary policy was to blame, it was because it was so successful at lowering inflation that interest rates came down, making mortgage payments more affordable. What you are saying is that you think rates should have been higher, even if that meant slower growth, higher unemployment and deflation in the CPI. I am not sure that would have been a better outcome.
Per capita growth trended down throughout Brown's period in Number 11. The growth in the headline GDP figure that we saw under New Labour was massaged by unsustainable debt and mass immigration. That's why we have been stagnant since the financial crisis.
Per capita GDP growth has been trending down since the 1970s. We've been stagnant since the financial crisis because the Tories have followed a series of dumb policies, like self-defeating austerity, failing to prepare for a pandemic and the grade A idiocy of Brexit. Gordon Brown really haunts Tories' dreams, he's the bogeyman who somehow still dictates our economic destiny 13 years after leaving office. (Surely by the same logic you can't blame him for anything he did during the 13 years of Labour rule, because that must have all been down to the previous government, right? Or am I mad to expect consistency or economic logic from this tendency?)
My criticism of Brown has nothing to do with buying Osborne's narrative and indeed I criticise Osborne for continuing in the same paradigm. Don't forget that Labour's policy in 2010 was austerity so to treat it as a dividing line is revisionist propaganda.
Alistair Darling has conceded that if Labour is re-elected public spending cuts will be "tougher and deeper" than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
I think the average voter appears to believe in liberty for themself but rules for others - they want the 'security' that less freedom allows, but do not want those rules to apply to themselves where possible. In other words, they want to 'have their cake and eat it'.
This attitude ended up being put into practice by certain politicians and civil servants at Number 10, not to mention by one or two elements of the media (with two of the most judgemental and fervently pro-lockdown journalists also breaking lockdown restrictions).
This does not of course mean that most members of the public broke the rules; rather that they mainly supported the rules because of their effect on everyone else.
I think Lilico, for once, is right, that 'liberty' in this country seems largely to be treated as a luxury to be discarded swiftly in a crisis, usually to popular approval, rather than as an essential tenet of civilized society. It is not a vote-winner.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
The tripartite system introduced additional risk by creating siloes without proper political accountability for the big picture.
A bad thing perhaps but largely irrelevant to the GFC. Regulation needed to change, it was changed, and subsequently has been changed again. We have still seen individual banks make huge losses, and if the banks do not realise they are on the hook, it is hard to see how regulators would know (indeed, perhaps the only good argument for a Tobin tax is that it would reveal this information).
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Well, the expert chap told him (a) not to worry, (b) predicted the end result.
Which seems pretty fair.
Well it is his money.
As he put it, talking to the Top Chap cost about as much as moderately serious service for a car. Which do you love more - child or car?
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
I think the average voter appears to believe in liberty for themself but rules for others - they want the 'security' that less freedom allows, but do not want those rules to apply to themselves where possible. In other words, they want to 'have their cake and eat it'.
This attitude ended up being put into practice by certain politicians and civil servants at Number 10, not to mention by one or two elements of the media (with two of the most judgemental and fervently pro-lockdown journalists also breaking lockdown restrictions).
This does not of course mean that most members of the public broke the rules; rather that they mainly supported the rules because of their effect on everyone else.
I think Lilico, for once, is right, that 'liberty' in this country seems largely to be treated as a luxury to be discarded swiftly in a crisis, usually to popular approval, rather than as an essential tenet of civilized society. It is not a vote-winner.
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
Is the last point true though? The media were indeed baying for more lockdowns and sooner at every press conference.
But were they doing it because of research into public attitudes or just trying to get a gotcha moment at the pressers. As was pointed out repeatedly by the more sane of us watching these things, journos from the actual health beat were kept well away while the likes of Peston bleated on.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
Personal anecdote alert.
A friends daughter announced she was trans. Teenager.
So he spent a fortune finding the best head shrinker who specialised in the field. Who said that he reckoned not, but could be wrong. But that she had other issues to work through.
So my friend invested in shrinks of the open minded variety. And told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her.
In then end, she decided that she wasn't trans.
So, what is the moral of the anecdote? We have a teenager being a teenager. Teenager worked through some issues. Everyone's happy.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
Don't spend 'a fortune on the best head shrinker who specialised in the field' is probably the moral ?
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Well, the expert chap told him (a) not to worry, (b) predicted the end result.
Which seems pretty fair.
Well it is his money.
As he put it, talking to the Top Chap cost about as much as moderately serious service for a car. Which do you love more - child or car?
I don't talk with my car; I do with my children.
Getting an expert to help is nearly always a good idea. The big problem with this parenting lark is that by the time you’ve worked out all the answers, the children have moved onto he next comedy….
Osborne wonders if we (and the world generally) would have locked down had China not done so.
V good question.
Of course we bloody would have. It was Italy's experience that triggered everyone taking it so seriously. And our own experiences that cause lockdowns 2 and 3.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Absolutely. We should be challenging this on the demand-side, rather than the supply-side.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Absolutely yes. Except the bust never came when it should have.
Under Thatcher house price to income ratio was 3-4x for almost her entire tenure and peaked at just over 5x.
Under Brown house prices exploded from a trough of 3x to a peak of over 7x income.
That was a bubble the likes of which never happened under Thatcher, and has caused systemic problems for the economy and for young generations as the long-overdue correction has never happened and there is no easy or painfree way to bring ratios back to 3-4x as they should be from over 7x without severe pain for people.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Yes, his leading of the rescue and mitigation effort was first class. He was the right person at the right time. Where he can be fairly criticized imo is in the years before, falling for the City's self-image and propaganda that it could be trusted to assess and manage risk. Or maybe he didn't fall for it, maybe he chose to not think about it on account of the booming tax revenues, but either way it was remiss. It was the prevailing UK/US business culture of the time, therefore hard to go against the grain of, and the Tories would have been even more laissez faire, these things are true but don't get him off the hook. He was a powerful CoE, took the plaudits when all looked well, hence must take some blame for it going pear.
As I have said in the past. Brown was a great PM and a bad CoE. Part of his greatness as PM was his ability to clean up the mess caused by his decisions as CoE. Although to be fair he also deserves credit for cleaning up the messes caused by other countries' CoEs, so there's that
Yep - overrated CoE, underrated PM. You and me against the world.
Brown's period as PM came to an early end because of the effects of the financial crisis that engulfed it, but had it not been for that financial crisis I think that in some ways Brown's reputation would now be even worse.
Despite plotting and brooding for years over getting the top job he had precisely zero idea what to do with it when he did. For me that was the primary disappointment of his time as PM, and it would have been cruelly exposed if he hadn't had a global economic crisis to fill his time with.
Off-topic, but on a topic that's frequently discussed here: I had lunch yesterday with a nurse who works at a residential mental hospital in England for children and adolescents aged 12-18. The institution contains a school. It does not specialise in caring for patients who have been diagnosed with any specific illness, other than that the illness must be mental and they must be diagnosed as needing residential care for it. About half of its ~40 patients are girls.
She tells me that ALL of the girls apart from one who suffers from psychosis are identifying either as "they" for non-binary, or as "he".
Is that a chicken and egg situation?
No. I asked the same question and going by what my friend says there is an answer to it. The hospital doesn't specialise in treating patients with problems related to gender identity. It's just that being recorded as having such problems, which are entered on the record whenever a patient self-identifies as non-binary or trans, has been the path of least resistance for almost all of the ~20 girls who live in the hospital's catchment area and who are being housed there for any of a wide range of mental issues that require residential care.
So...anybody who identifies as non-binary or trans is recorded as mentally ill?
The issue surely is whether there are other underlying issues ie is the identification a symptom of other conditions or the end product? That is why it is necessary to have a whole person approach to any child presenting themselves as dysphoric in order to understand what are the reasons behind it and how might the child be best treated. Unfortunately child mental health services are poor and not joined up. That was one of the problems with the Tavistock gender clinic and it is one of the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. Focusing on only one aspect of a child's distress is foolish and likely to be unhelpful. Affirming a self-diagnosis without inquiring into what is really going on is also foolish and poor medicine/ therapy.
Girls at puberty are very prone to all sorts of pressures and distress: see eating disorders for instance. It would be wise to try and understand properly what is happening and do what is best for the individual rather than seek to impose some sort of one size fits all policy.
No I understood the point (and the references) but I'm thinking that the whole approach may be flawed. If teenage trans self-identification is a fad and fancy of people finding puberty traumatic, then the best approach may not be to lock them in a mental hospital and subject them to a barrage of tests to find out what's really wrong, it may simply be to ignore them and let them grow out of it by themselves. It would certainly be more cost effective and - as you note - would not end up with mental hospitals being increasingly filled with non-binary teens.
Somebody once said that the reason why the GP system survives is that it gives people somebody sympathetic to talk to, and anything serious is diverted to proper doctors. A similar system seems to be evolving here.
[Edit: I seem to have conflated two posts, one by @Westie , one by @Cyclefree . Apologies, although I think my point still holds]
The real problems, as we have seen, occur when the children are indulged unquestioningly in their ‘identity’, by the educational and medical system, and not allowed the chance to simply grow out of it.
Your point (children are over-diagnosed as trans) and my point (we are too quick to use medical models for normal human variation) and @Malmesbury's point (such things are best addressed by non-surgical experimentation and a noncommittal sounding board) are colliding, had we the wit to recognize it.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Absolutely yes. Except the bust never came when it should have.
Under Thatcher house price to income ratio was 3-4x for almost her entire tenure and peaked at just over 5x.
Under Brown house prices exploded from a trough of 3x to a peak of over 7x income.
That was a bubble the likes of which never happened under Thatcher, and has caused systemic problems for the economy and for young generations as the long-overdue correction has never happened and there is no easy or painfree way to bring ratios back to 3-4x as they should be from over 7x without severe pain for people.
The correction in housing did occur in 2008, but it was a correction of housing costs (mortgages) as opposed to a correction of housing prices.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Absolutely. We should be challenging this on the demand-side, rather than the supply-side.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
North Sea oil production isn’t being shut down, nor is that Labour’s policy. Plenty more oil will still come out of the North Sea.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Absolutely. We should be challenging this on the demand-side, rather than the supply-side.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
It works both ways. Need is a function of price, and price is a function of supply. That's why we have to approach from both the production and consumption side.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Undoubtedly. House prices rose 206% between 1997 and 2007.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Abolishing boom and bust came from sidestepping European recessions of 2000 and 2001 using counter-cyclical spending. Hubris, yes, but again largely irrelevant to the GFC.
However, the house price boom, and associated dodgy lending, ought to have been a red light.
A red light for what? Britain's house price boom might have been a real problem but is irrelevant to the GFC.
A red light that we were in the middle of an asset price boom, fuelled by reckless lending.
They used the "Anglo-Saxon" phrase - burn them! burn them!
I'm really looking forward to this exhibition - it's at the Arch and Anth Museum on Downing Street, and I've been pressing my nose up against the glass for the last week or two as it has come together.
Let's say we thought the UK's future oil needs were for 1000 arbitrary units, but we're taking action, so the UK's future oil needs are actually only for 100 arbitrary units. And let's say that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units. In that context, Bart's fear that we'll have to get oil from OPEC states instead is invalid and it makes sense to block future North Sea exploration.
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Absolutely. We should be challenging this on the demand-side, rather than the supply-side.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
It works both ways. Need is a function of price, and price is a function of supply. That's why we have to approach from both the production and consumption side.
You keep repeating this myth while ignoring the fact we don't control the production side, OPEC do.
We do control our contribution to the consumption side and can export clean technologies to the rest of the world.
So how does outsourcing production to OPEC help?
Or are you proposing we use our military to invade OPEC nations and compel them to shut down production too?
They used the "Anglo-Saxon" phrase - burn them! burn them!
I'm really looking forward to this exhibition - it's at the Arch and Anth Museum on Downing Street, and I've been pressing my nose up against the glass for the last week or two as it has come together.
I'll take my son there to see that as well - he loves that museum.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Yes, but sorry to break it to you, but podgy Kier will be worse. Unlike Sunak, he knows fuck all about business and he has failed (unlike Blair) to make up for that massive deficit by surrounding himself with people that do. I hope I am wrong, but I expect to see the economy improve a little on the optimism of a change of government but then for it to tank under the mismanagement of people that have even less understanding of how an economy and business works that Peppa Pig Boy and Lizzy Lightweight combined.
In that case, let me put you out of your misery: you are wrong.
The Shadow Chancellor worked as an economist for the Bank of England, the UK embassy in Washington DC and Halifax Bank of Scotland before entering the Commons. She also chaired the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee from 2017 to 2020. These are not the hallmarks of a wide-eyed ingenue that “knows fuck all about business”, are they?
We should do Net Zero when we can afford it says the Sun. They don't say when that will be.
And so the world will continue to burn.
We will never be able to afford Net Zero, until that is everyone wakes up to the costs of not doing it.
We might do better saving for those costs than burning the economy...because like it or not, change is coming.
Some mitigations are cheap and/or better. We should definitely do those.
In climate science they talk about mitigation, "reducing the amount of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions," and adaptation, "adapting to the global warming not avoided."
Where are you guys picking up on this different use of mitigation?
Most of the evidence is that mitigation is much, much cheaper than adaptation. And especially now when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels anyway, so all you're doing by increasing mitigation efforts is pulling forward investment that would be made eventually anyway. Hardly burning the economy.
The problem is that some people have a rather extreme colonialist attitude that the UK and the West in general can impose its will on the whole world to engage in mitigation, when some like Russia or OPEC nations are not remotely interested and are not free democracies with free speech to engage with either.
The UK can seek to cut oil consumption, that is something in our hands. And if we do, then global consumption of oil will fall (as nobody is going to increase their consumption to counter our reduction) and our investment in alternative technologies can encourage others to do the same.
What the UK can not and should not seek is to unilaterally cut oil extraction, as that is not in our hands. If we cut our production of oil, eg in the North Sea, and switch to importing even more oil instead all that does is make it even more profitable for OPEC and even less likely they'll want to ever act on this matter.
We're doing both: cutting consumption and extraction. The theory is that we'll cut our consumption so much that we won't need to "switch to importing ever more oil instead".
The UK needs oil, and will continue to for the future.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
What we need to do, is not to focus on oil production, but to do things like change over to zero carbon Perspex (quite possible) and the zero carbon technologies for concrete (some are quite promising).
Absolutely. We should be challenging this on the demand-side, rather than the supply-side.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
North Sea oil production isn’t being shut down, nor is that Labour’s policy. Plenty more oil will still come out of the North Sea.
Licences don't last forever. New licences are needed to replace old licences as they expire.
A moratorium on new licences is ultimately a moratorium on production.
Let's say we thought the UK's future oil needs were for 1000 arbitrary units, but we're taking action, so the UK's future oil needs are actually only for 100 arbitrary units. And let's say that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units. In that context, Bart's fear that we'll have to get oil from OPEC states instead is invalid and it makes sense to block future North Sea exploration.
Except the plan is not to throttle new licences down to 250 units, its to have them at 0.
We have probably seen the most dysfunctional Government in living memory over the last three years. They have overseen an economic clusterf*** of gargantuan proportions, yet the PB glitterati have reassured themselves by focusing on what they consider to be the negative elements of Brown's tenure as both PM and CoE.
Even BBC WATO have the "mortgage timebomb" as top story. They haven't yet confirmed this is Gordon Brown's doing.
Brown was correct in stepping in to save Northern Rock . A failure to do this would have seen a domino effect of people rushing to pull savings from other banks.
Then you have the public losing faith in the banking system , banks losing their liquidity and general chaos .
I find it astonishing that Brown continues to get criticized for doing what was necessary to stop economic armaggedon. .
Brown gets criticised because he changed UK banking regulation with the creation of the FSA (a huge but almost entirely useless organisation) which let so many UK banks get into a mess in the first place. You make the rules, shit hits the fan as a result, you are in part to blame. Simple.
At an even more basic level he came into office promising not to stoke another housing boom and smugly boasted of abolishing boom and bust even as annual house price inflation approached 30%.
Setting monetary policy purely around targetting CPI was obviously creating unsustainable asset bubbles and malinvestment.
Don't forget the love of using PFI. Another great gift to the country from Brown.
PFI was actually the invention of the Major government, but expanded under Blair/Brown. It was continued enthusiastically by the Cameron government and only stopped in 2018 by May.
There you go again with your pesky facts. Remember - Gordon Brown made the cows' milk run dry with the evil power of his eye. He made the women of the village barren. He sold our gold to illegal immigrants. He spent so much on Sure Start that it made Lehmann Brothers explode. If you don't pray to St Rishi his great clunking fist will haunt your dreams forever. Only by burning Gordon Brown in a giant wicker statue of Nigel Lawson on the playing fields of Eton will our country be cleansed and purified and run once more with milk and honey.
'Facts' is doing a lot of legwork there.
As I've said many times in the past, PFI is a perfectly fine for some projects. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, it was used for projects such as roads, often under a DBFO model (Design - Build - Finance - Operate).
For things like roads, it can be a good fit, as they are relatively easy to operate (basically, keep the road open as much as possible and in a good state).
The advantages for things like schools are less clear, as the 'operation' of a school building might well be an order of magnitude mote complex than a road. When it comes to hospitals, I'd argue they're a couple of orders of magnitude more complex than roads.
So it depends on how the model is used. And sadly for your argument, Brown saw a massive increase in the use of PFI on complex projects such as schools and hospitals - for political reasons. Some worked reasonably well for the state. Many were disastrous.
Brown used a nail gun to fill a hole in a wall - totally the wrong tool.
Thatcher Blair Major Cameron May Brown Sunak Johnson Truss
You are very kind to Cameron, who I think is the PM whose stock has fallen the most since leaving office.
My list would be
Blair (despite Iraq) Thatcher Major Brown May Sunak Cameron Johnson Truss
Fun game.
My list would be.
Thatcher Cameron Major Johnson Blair Sunak May Truss Brown
And yes, I wanted Johnson out before he left and would not want him back, but I'd say the same to everyone I ranked below him too.
Truss above Brown for what reason? Colour of rosette?
No, not colour of rosette, I put Blair ahead of Sunak, May and Truss.
Truss ahead of Brown as she was removed before she did too much damage. She was bad, I called for her to resign before she did, but she was quickly ousted before much worse happened.
Her Premiership was like stepping on a piece of Lego. Short and painful but quickly over.
The legacy of Gordon Brown was far more toxic and far more long-lasting. It needed a decade of austerity to clean up his mess.
But the toxic legacy of Gordon Brown was more due to his time as Chancellor than that of his time as PM.
It is judging of them as PM not overall.
Indeed, it is hard to separate the two, which is why I rated Blair down in only 5th spot, he's down-rated due to Brown's legacy as Chancellor. Had it not been for Brown as Chancellor I'd have Blair up higher.
But Brown made matters even worse as PM. He completely botched the financial crisis by bailing out the failed banks, rather than allowing them to go bust and protecting guaranteed creditors instead like Iceland did.
That added much more debt than was necessary to an already bad problem and completely warped the market by suggesting that firms were too big to fail and making moral hazard a major problem.
Don't forget Brown is a war criminal who should be in the dock at the Hague alongside Blair.
As for Cameron, in his farewell speech to the Commons he focused on the introduction of gay marriage as a major achievement of his seven years in office. He only looks good compared with the four incompetents who succeeded him. And insofar as he was on the right side of the argument about EU membership.
Anyone who suggests either Blair or Brown is a war criminal is outing themselves as ridiculous.
And yes, Cameron deserves massive praise for introduction of equal marriage rights. 👍
He said it was the achievement he was most proud of. And I'll resist the obvious comment of 'from a short list' because it was an achievement and he's right to feel that way.
Particularly against the majority of his MPs; nowadays the PM is running scared of a minority of his.
'Dave' masked it for a while but the Tory Party seem to be uncomfortable with the modern world again. Not sure about Sunak at all. I find it hard to get a read on what he's all about. When he took over I was a bit worried he might be very good but no, he decidedly isn't. Phew.
Yes, but sorry to break it to you, but podgy Kier will be worse. Unlike Sunak, he knows fuck all about business and he has failed (unlike Blair) to make up for that massive deficit by surrounding himself with people that do. I hope I am wrong, but I expect to see the economy improve a little on the optimism of a change of government but then for it to tank under the mismanagement of people that have even less understanding of how an economy and business works that Peppa Pig Boy and Lizzy Lightweight combined.
In that case, let me put you out of your misery: you are wrong.
The Shadow Chancellor worked as an economist for the Bank of England, the UK embassy in Washington DC and Halifax Bank of Scotland before entering the Commons. She also chaired the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee from 2017 to 2020. These are not the hallmarks of a wide-eyed ingenue that “knows fuck all about business”, are they?
Wind your bloody neck in, for Pete’s sake.
Whilst Rishi is undoubtedly preferable to his two predecessors, does he actually know much about business in his own right? As opposed to taking punts on other people's businesses?
Let's say we thought the UK's future oil needs were for 1000 arbitrary units, but we're taking action, so the UK's future oil needs are actually only for 100 arbitrary units. And let's say that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units. In that context, Bart's fear that we'll have to get oil from OPEC states instead is invalid and it makes sense to block future North Sea exploration.
Except the plan is not to throttle new licences down to 250 units, its to have them at 0.
The units are totals, not rates. We're saying that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units (over many years). There's enough oil there and we won't need any more. If that is true, would you withdraw your objection?
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Undoubtedly. House prices rose 206% between 1997 and 2007.
They also nearly doubled between 1982 and 1989 and then fell back much harder than 2007
Let's say we thought the UK's future oil needs were for 1000 arbitrary units, but we're taking action, so the UK's future oil needs are actually only for 100 arbitrary units. And let's say that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units. In that context, Bart's fear that we'll have to get oil from OPEC states instead is invalid and it makes sense to block future North Sea exploration.
Except the plan is not to throttle new licences down to 250 units, its to have them at 0.
The units are totals, not rates. We're saying that existing North Sea developments will deliver 250 arbitrary units (over many years). There's enough oil there and we won't need any more. If that is true, would you withdraw your objection?
Why deny the country the export opportunity, complete with positive effects both in tax revenues and balance-of-payments?
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Undoubtedly. House prices rose 206% between 1997 and 2007.
They also nearly doubled between 1982 and 1989 and then fell back much harder than 2007
How much quantitative easing was there in the early 1990s?
Propping up house prices has caused a lot of pain in the last 15 years.
Comments
They might not increase consumption to spite the west, but with lower demand from the West it makes fossil fuels financially more attractive. This results in an economic incentive for other countries to increase consumption.
I do agree that unilateral action has little impact on global CO2 unless it can be used to persuade other countries to do likewise.
I presume the moral, therefore, is when he "told her, basically, that its was her choice and he would support her." We should do that. The question is, does that count as "Affirming a self-diagnosis"?
See this from para 70 Lady Hale in Miller:
Unless there is some Parliamentary rule to the contrary of which we are unaware, the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker can take immediate steps to enable each House to meet as soon as possible to decide upon a way forward. That would, of
course, be a proceeding in Parliament which could not be called in question in this or any other court.
Strangely enough we haven't had any fires since they disappeared.
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
FTFY
Tate was complaining about the glacial pace of Romanian justice, presumably he’ll be happy now.
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
54m
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico
Banks have been in disrepute among most of the population in Britain for 15 years now. This and the decline in tobacco smoking have been among the very few positive developments in the country.
Unfortunately the same can't be said about the reputation of insurers, solicitors, and medics. People continue to buy insurance policies they don't need, not noticing for example that few houses nowadays burn down or collapse into sinkholes. They still hire solicitors unnecessarily, for example to "help" them with inheritance matters or with conveyancing, although there isn't quite so much timeshare scamming as there used to be. They also continue to defer to medics, even though one or two medics in every given area have a few things said about them that circulate. But then again the whole f*cking media is full of "experts" saying this and "experts" saying that - often referred to as "experts" without being identified, which is new. People can't have much of a problem with it because if it made them feel sick they'd stop visiting the websites or reading the newspapers and as a result advertising revenue would plummet.
Bankers' reputations could fall much further though, it's true. Hopefully what people think about those leeches will translate into actions that they take. It could all happen very fast. Indeed if it happens at all, its got to. I'm always up for a good run on the banks. It's surely got to be one of the ideas that counter-"disinformation" bods or those who have counter-"disinformation" responsibilities watch out for.
My friend isn't insane, himself. Teenage girls are often a mess of hormones, worries and fears about life, the universe and everything.
Help as much as you can (the prejudice against seeing a shrink is stupid) and try and stay calm is simply good parenting.
If you end oil exploration in the North Sea then that leaves importing ever more oil as the only alternative.
Which makes oil even more profitable for OPEC and leaves them even less likely to want to tackle climate change. And helps the climate not at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lndtSbwSyY
https://www.ft.com/content/4c52dde0-a2c1-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c98a2
It's an extraordinary indictment of our politics that the Covid Inquiry is wasting time investigating whether the Coalition govt's fiscal consolidation programme was responsible for the way things went in the NHS during Covid.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671090289920942080
The gap btwn what politics focuses upon with the options it thinks matters & anything I think matters or what are the plausible options to address it is now so wide that it's increasingly difficult to see what the point is of engaging politically at all.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671091428519206912
It's like Covid unleashed a collective madness in our political class, crystallising all the worst aspects it had been accumulating since 2015 & fusing them into a self-destructive unmooring.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671092498695876609
How can anyone who remembers 2020, with journalists constantly demanding harsher restrictions, newspapers denouncing young people for sitting in a park & lakes dyed to put people off visiting the countryside, take seriously the idea Britons genuinely believe in personal liberty?
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671094219463614468
We aren't a country that believes in freedom. We're a country where a teacher who shows pictures of a religion's prophet is hounded into hiding for fear of death for the rest of his life & our government does absolutely nothing about it.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671096170708365375
Believing in freedom isn't telling a pollster "Freedom matters to me". If you believe in freedom you actually have to *do* things.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671096282906087424
But they don't. The reason the journalists & newspapers were as restrictions-demanding & censorious as they were in 2020 is that research was clear that that was overwhelmingly what the public wanted.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1671097860643848192
Gordon Brown really haunts Tories' dreams, he's the bogeyman who somehow still dictates our economic destiny 13 years after leaving office. (Surely by the same logic you can't blame him for anything he did during the 13 years of Labour rule, because that must have all been down to the previous government, right? Or am I mad to expect consistency or economic logic from this tendency?)
It has been dyed a couple of times to try to stop people swimming in it. It has the pH of a fairly strong bleach solution - seriously harmful to swim in it.
An organised no show might have been precisely what you describe.
What seems to be the reality is a bunch of disorganised, rather craven individuals carefully avoided making a stand.
They used the "Anglo-Saxon" phrase - burn them! burn them!
The bit after the shrinks was sensible.
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Which seems pretty fair.
As either something which takes the place of government investment in capital projects, or (see Brown) as a dodge for keeping spending off the government balance sheet, it has been fairly disastrous.
One of the biggest mistakes government has made over the last couple of decades is to fail to take much advantage of an historically extremely low cost of government borrowing to invest in large public infrastructure projects likely to see a decent economic return.
The interminable delays on deciding whether or not to proceed with new nuclear, of build HS2, or a new trans-Pennine line are good examples of that.
One could in the same manner argue that renationalising water on money borrowed at 1-2% would have amounted to playing the private equity predators at their own game.
Too late now, of course.
Is my view confirmation bias or yours the same? Who knows. All I can tell you (to apply a little balance) is that even as someone who is right of centre I would say that the Blair government was a much better period than the Johnson one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8587877.stm
Alistair Darling has conceded that if Labour is re-elected public spending cuts will be "tougher and deeper" than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.
This attitude ended up being put into practice by certain politicians and civil servants at Number 10, not to mention by one or two elements of the media (with two of the most judgemental and fervently pro-lockdown journalists also breaking lockdown restrictions).
This does not of course mean that most members of the public broke the rules; rather that they mainly supported the rules because of their effect on everyone else.
I think Lilico, for once, is right, that 'liberty' in this country seems largely to be treated as a luxury to be discarded swiftly in a crisis, usually to popular approval, rather than as an essential tenet of civilized society. It is not a vote-winner.
But were they doing it because of research into public attitudes or just trying to get a gotcha moment at the pressers. As was pointed out repeatedly by the more sane of us watching these things, journos from the actual health beat were kept well away while the likes of Peston bleated on.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/police-raid-headquarters-of-paris-olympics-organisers/ar-AA1cMqed
More in Common 19% lead (+8%)
Deltapoll 19% (+8%)
R&W 20% (+6%)
Omnisis 22% (+2%)
Techne 16% (+3%)
It was Italy's experience that triggered everyone taking it so seriously.
And our own experiences that cause lockdowns 2 and 3.
Eliminate the need for oil, and people will stop extracting it. But for as long as it is needed, it needs to be supplied, and getting that supply from the North Sea is better than getting it from OPEC.
Under Thatcher house price to income ratio was 3-4x for almost her entire tenure and peaked at just over 5x.
Under Brown house prices exploded from a trough of 3x to a peak of over 7x income.
That was a bubble the likes of which never happened under Thatcher, and has caused systemic problems for the economy and for young generations as the long-overdue correction has never happened and there is no easy or painfree way to bring ratios back to 3-4x as they should be from over 7x without severe pain for people.
Despite plotting and brooding for years over getting the top job he had precisely zero idea what to do with it when he did. For me that was the primary disappointment of his time as PM, and it would have been cruelly exposed if he hadn't had a global economic crisis to fill his time with.
Gulags for slags ffs. He didn't have a clue.
"...Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests. I know this is hard for you Americans to imagine, but please try..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lndtSbwSyY
We do control our contribution to the consumption side and can export clean technologies to the rest of the world.
So how does outsourcing production to OPEC help?
Or are you proposing we use our military to invade OPEC nations and compel them to shut down production too?
The Shadow Chancellor worked as an economist for the Bank of England, the UK embassy in Washington DC and Halifax Bank of Scotland before entering the Commons. She also chaired the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee from 2017 to 2020. These are not the hallmarks of a wide-eyed ingenue that “knows fuck all about business”, are they?
Wind your bloody neck in, for Pete’s sake.
A moratorium on new licences is ultimately a moratorium on production. Except the plan is not to throttle new licences down to 250 units, its to have them at 0.
Even BBC WATO have the "mortgage timebomb" as top story. They haven't yet confirmed this is Gordon Brown's doing.
As I've said many times in the past, PFI is a perfectly fine for some projects. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, it was used for projects such as roads, often under a DBFO model (Design - Build - Finance - Operate).
For things like roads, it can be a good fit, as they are relatively easy to operate (basically, keep the road open as much as possible and in a good state).
The advantages for things like schools are less clear, as the 'operation' of a school building might well be an order of magnitude mote complex than a road. When it comes to hospitals, I'd argue they're a couple of orders of magnitude more complex than roads.
So it depends on how the model is used. And sadly for your argument, Brown saw a massive increase in the use of PFI on complex projects such as schools and hospitals - for political reasons. Some worked reasonably well for the state. Many were disastrous.
Brown used a nail gun to fill a hole in a wall - totally the wrong tool.
Propping up house prices has caused a lot of pain in the last 15 years.