Brexit - driving up inflation, making people poorer, not delivering anything that it promised except for the bastards who are happy to see us all poorer so they can profit.
It's tempting to laugh at people like that, but I think it shows just how poor political discourse was during the referendum. I keep saying this, but the remain side needed to present Freedom of Movement as a *Positive* to Brits, not something that had to be "endured".
It is fairly remarkable that Cameron, who wasn't the worst of communicators, failed to get people like that onside.
Similarly, I often end up listening to Farming Today when I wake up early. Farmers who appear complaining about Brexit, having voted for it, seems an almost daily occurrence.
Best bit is Tony n Suze from Manchester
“We can only stay here for four days, in order to have a longer stay this summer. These new post-Brexit travel rules are driving us mad and killing our dolce vita. We’re second-home owners, we should be treated differently from other Brit tourists. This cottage has cost us a fortune to restyle. We thought we were going to spend our future life here,” says Tony, who used to work at a software company...."
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
The Government can't do that because it would mean one rules for Home owners (being protected) and 1 rule for renters who are having to pay whatever their landlord is insisting on to cover their higher loan costs.
If the payments were done on a flat basis of say £1k/house - surely Landlords would pass on the saving because they're "good chaps".
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
Didn't he swear, at risk of perjury, that the evidence he gave at his confirmation hearing was true ?
Notable in light of Justice Alito's WSJ op-ed: during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said he recuses himself when “any possible question might arise.”
ProPublica asked about Alito’s travel. He replied in the Wall Street Journal. Questioned about an undisclosed fishing trip hosted by a GOP billionaire, the Supreme Court justice instead shared his rebuttal in a rival media outlet — before the investigative journalists could publish their scoop https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/21/alito-wsj-propublica-fishing-trip/
Can you imagine the personal heartache that would cause? Hard working people ruined for life. I don't know the answer, but a couple of million people crushed forever is not politically astute.
This attitude perhaps goes to the crux of one of our problems as a nation. No American would think that if you overextend yourself financially and things go wrong, you are "ruined for life".
Indeed and the failure of Fanny Mae, Freddie Mack and Lehman Brothers with no intervention by Bush upset the world order. Your non interventionist ideology is as mad as Corbyn's intervene at any cost.
Brexit - driving up inflation, making people poorer, not delivering anything that it promised except for the bastards who are happy to see us all poorer so they can profit.
It's tempting to laugh at people like that, but I think it shows just how poor political discourse was during the referendum. I keep saying this, but the remain side needed to present Freedom of Movement as a *Positive* to Brits, not something that had to be "endured".
It is fairly remarkable that Cameron, who wasn't the worst of communicators, failed to get people like that onside.
Similarly, I often end up listening to Farming Today when I wake up early. Farmers who appear complaining about Brexit, having voted for it, seems an almost daily occurrence.
Best bit is Tony n Suze from Manchester
“We can only stay here for four days, in order to have a longer stay this summer. These new post-Brexit travel rules are driving us mad and killing our dolce vita. We’re second-home owners, we should be treated differently from other Brit tourists. This cottage has cost us a fortune to restyle. We thought we were going to spend our future life here,” says Tony, who used to work at a software company...."
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
I just don't understand what it would achieve. It wouldn't ultimately fix the problem of a shortage of housing. It might keep people in their houses, which is not negligible, but it would bugger their ability to move quickly.
I would have said if they go down that route there would have to be some kind of debt for equity swap. As in, the government takes on your mortgage if you like but you now live in, in effect, a council house.
But there won't be. It would just be free money.
Very nice for me and my sister if it happens as we're about to sell our father's house and that should clear our mortgages - so instead, we can use that money for other things and get our rather nice houses paid for by the government.
But should the government be subsidising people in that situation? Hell no.
As unpalatable as it may be house prices are going to fall, repossessions rise, and negative equity rear its head again as in the 1990s and that did involve a lot of pain but an eventual reduction in house prices
One thing is certain neither Sunak or Starmer can afford to underwrite the housing market
That's a bit of an I'm alright Jack view. I am too, but I don't wish to see a couple of million people's lives fail.
Many of those on here who were decrying the mental health issues from lockdowns are quite content to see the heartache and resultant mental health issues from widespread repossessions.
Again I agree with you and I remember the1990's vividly and I would not wish that on anyone but it is almost identical and there is no easy answer as was the case then
I am not content with anyone suffering mental health issues not least from the critical mental health issues my eldest in Canada has gone through
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
I just don't understand what it would achieve. It wouldn't ultimately fix the problem of a shortage of housing. It might keep people in their houses, which is not negligible, but it would bugger their ability to move quickly.
I would have said if they go down that route there would have to be some kind of debt for equity swap. As in, the government takes on your mortgage if you like but you now live in, in effect, a council house.
But there won't be. It would just be free money.
Very nice for me and my sister if it happens as we're about to sell our father's house and that should clear our mortgages - so instead, we can use that money for other things and get our rather nice houses paid for by the government.
But should the government be subsidising people in that situation? Hell no.
As unpalatable as it may be house prices are going to fall, repossessions rise, and negative equity rear its head again as in the 1990s and that did involve a lot of pain but an eventual reduction in house prices
One thing is certain neither Sunak or Starmer can afford to underwrite the housing market
House prices will likely recover in time. Unless supply outstrips demand in the medium to long term (hint, it wont), then there will be a base, and it will recover. We need to have the short term shock to cool the market and allow a couple of years of rebalancing.
As with all these things they’re horrible and unpleasant if you’re left holding the baby at the time you were hoping to cash out/need the remortgage, but that is the concept of an investment. It goes down as well as up.
The very frustrating thing was the wilful fantasy from all involved that low interest rates were forever and that they weren’t bashing people about the head with warnings that they could really come a cropper. This looks especially scandalous given the cause of the last financial crisis.
Didn't he swear, at risk of perjury, that the evidence he gave at his confirmation hearing was true ?
Notable in light of Justice Alito's WSJ op-ed: during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said he recuses himself when “any possible question might arise.”
ProPublica asked about Alito’s travel. He replied in the Wall Street Journal. Questioned about an undisclosed fishing trip hosted by a GOP billionaire, the Supreme Court justice instead shared his rebuttal in a rival media outlet — before the investigative journalists could publish their scoop https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/21/alito-wsj-propublica-fishing-trip/
And folk still wonder who leaked the Dobbs opinion in advance.
Can you imagine the personal heartache that would cause? Hard working people ruined for life. I don't know the answer, but a couple of million people crushed forever is not politically astute.
This attitude perhaps goes to the crux of one of our problems as a nation. No American would think that if you overextend yourself financially and things go wrong, you are "ruined for life".
Indeed and the failure of Fanny Mae, Freddie Mack and Lehman Brothers with no intervention by Bush upset the world order. Your non interventionist ideology is as mad as Corbyn's intervene at any cost.
I don't have a non-interventionist ideology. I'm just opposed to unnecessary hysteria.
Paywalled but my subjective, sorry, my lived experience of taking prescription modafinil is that while it does aid concentration, it narrows focus which may or may not be a good thing. If you like, it keeps you awake but does not stop you getting tired.
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
I just don't understand what it would achieve. It wouldn't ultimately fix the problem of a shortage of housing. It might keep people in their houses, which is not negligible, but it would bugger their ability to move quickly.
I would have said if they go down that route there would have to be some kind of debt for equity swap. As in, the government takes on your mortgage if you like but you now live in, in effect, a council house.
But there won't be. It would just be free money.
Very nice for me and my sister if it happens as we're about to sell our father's house and that should clear our mortgages - so instead, we can use that money for other things and get our rather nice houses paid for by the government.
But should the government be subsidising people in that situation? Hell no.
As unpalatable as it may be house prices are going to fall, repossessions rise, and negative equity rear its head again as in the 1990s and that did involve a lot of pain but an eventual reduction in house prices
One thing is certain neither Sunak or Starmer can afford to underwrite the housing market
One of them underwrote the national wage bill for a year...
Furlough was a very different situation which by the way was fully endorsed by all political parties at the time and defended millions of jobs
Well, if Sunak offered free mortgage subs tomorrow SKS would be hard pressed not to endorse it (or show himself as pro-expelling hard working families into the snow), and it would defend 100s of 000s of households, so I am not seeing the difference.
He won't and neither will Starmer
Did you not learn anything from the Truss debacle ?
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
I just don't understand what it would achieve. It wouldn't ultimately fix the problem of a shortage of housing. It might keep people in their houses, which is not negligible, but it would bugger their ability to move quickly.
I would have said if they go down that route there would have to be some kind of debt for equity swap. As in, the government takes on your mortgage if you like but you now live in, in effect, a council house.
But there won't be. It would just be free money.
Very nice for me and my sister if it happens as we're about to sell our father's house and that should clear our mortgages - so instead, we can use that money for other things and get our rather nice houses paid for by the government.
But should the government be subsidising people in that situation? Hell no.
As unpalatable as it may be house prices are going to fall, repossessions rise, and negative equity rear its head again as in the 1990s and that did involve a lot of pain but an eventual reduction in house prices
One thing is certain neither Sunak or Starmer can afford to underwrite the housing market
One of them underwrote the national wage bill for a year...
Furlough was a very different situation which by the way was fully endorsed by all political parties at the time and defended millions of jobs
Well, if Sunak offered free mortgage subs tomorrow SKS would be hard pressed not to endorse it (or show himself as pro-expelling hard working families into the snow), and it would defend 100s of 000s of households, so I am not seeing the difference.
He won't and neither will Starmer
Did you not learn anything from the Truss debacle ?
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
And I would gently suggest that rather than hector me about it, and attribute my understanding of just how bad things to an 'irrational hatred' of Gove, you remember that I am an expert in the field and you are not. Perhaps therefore the reason I disdain Gove is because I understand fully just how badly he messed up and you do not?
I'm sorry if my gentle "pace" felt like hectoring - it was only meant as achnowledgement of your disagreeement. I agree that I know little about his impact on education and you are certainly far more expert. I'm something of an expert in the Defra field, though, and the general view of industry, NGOs and, up to a point, farmers is that he did a good job there. It's not as though I was politically aligned, and he didn't do everything my charity wanted either, but he was proactive and generally effective at achieving positive change.
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
Starmer got monstered by a very impressive Sunak. Not mentioning Sunak's vote failure was a massive error, same goes for Flynn, although he did manage to bring in Brexit as the problem. Rishi handled both very well.
The mortgage issue was batted back as Labour's failure.
Possibly Starmer's worst performance against Sunak and a much improved Sunak. Not least because Starmer was rubbish.
Starmer links chaotic Conservative government to people being poorer. Can Sunak convince people that correlation doesn't imply causation?
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
5.75% minimum...
15 months is a long time in finance. It will have got up to there and come down again, by then.
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
The Government can't do that because it would mean one rules for Home owners (being protected) and 1 rule for renters who are having to pay whatever their landlord is insisting on to cover their higher loan costs.
If the payments were done on a flat basis of say £1k/house - surely Landlords would pass on the saving because they're "good chaps".
There's no fair way to do it. I remortgaged last year at a low-ish rate for a long period fixed. I expect I won't get anything as the rate will be pretty low.
On the other hand, I made what seems to be a good decision. So why should I not be supported too? (hint, I'm no sure if I should, but it would seem unfair if some people got payouts but not others)
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
The Government can't do that because it would mean one rules for Home owners (being protected) and 1 rule for renters who are having to pay whatever their landlord is insisting on to cover their higher loan costs.
If the payments were done on a flat basis of say £1k/house - surely Landlords would pass on the saving because they're "good chaps".
There's no fair way to do it. I remortgaged last year at a low-ish rate for a long period fixed. I expect I won't get anything as the rate will be pretty low.
On the other hand, I made what seems to be a good decision. So why should I not be supported too? (hint, I'm no sure if I should, but it would seem unfair if some people got payouts but not others)
The energy price cap punished those who made a good decision (In a round about way) but still - that principle has sailed.
And I would gently suggest that rather than hector me about it, and attribute my understanding of just how bad things to an 'irrational hatred' of Gove, you remember that I am an expert in the field and you are not. Perhaps therefore the reason I disdain Gove is because I understand fully just how badly he messed up and you do not?
I'm sorry if my gentle "pace" felt like hectoring - it was only meant as achnowledgement of your disagreeement. I agree that I know little about his impact on education and you are certainly far more expert. I'm something of an expert in the Defra field, though, and the general view of industry, NGOs and, up to a point, farmers is that he did a good job there. It's not as though I was politically aligned, and he didn't do everything my charity wanted either, but he was proactive and generally effective at achieving positive change.
Only fair to note in support of @ydoethur that his primary school colleagues are, if anything, even more scathing about Gove than is he.
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
5.75% minimum...
It will be a lot more if the Government starts to pay people's mortgages for them!
I remain (maybe optimistically given their recent performance) hopeful they won't do this so on that basis broadly concur 5.5 to 6.0%.
Fair point. As of this morning the current Bank of England Base Rate is 4.5%. Where do you see it by October 2024? (the predicted date of the next General Election)
5.75% minimum...
15 months is a long time in finance. It will have got up to there and come down again, by then.
That is on the way down - I expect interest rates to hit over 6% before inflation starts dropping.
We are definitely in a world of Stagflation at the moment but nothing is going to fix that without a recession. And even that may not reduce wage inflation...
On a similar theme, I surely cannot be the only one who cut back on energy use in the winter, not because I couldn’t afford to pay (I am fortunate enough to be able to do so) but because it felt like the right thing to do, and therefore basically won some extra cash I didn’t need in the form of the support payments.
There must be quite a few like me which can’t be helping with the cooling of demand the BoE is trying to do.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
Think of it like having a baby.
We decided to have baby seven months before a weird terrorist group blew up all the nursery school buildings and around the same time all forms of nappies were rendered unusable via a bizarre form of intergalactic nappy-attacking laser beam
In retrospect, the timing of Brexit was sub optimal
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
Think of it like having a baby.
We decided to have baby seven months before a weird terrorist group blew up all the nursery school buildings and around the same time all forms of nappies were rendered unusable via a bizarre form of intergalactic nappy-attacking laser beam
In retrospect, the timing of Brexit was sub optimal
The timing, manner, and basic fact of. But you're getting the idea.
And I would gently suggest that rather than hector me about it, and attribute my understanding of just how bad things to an 'irrational hatred' of Gove, you remember that I am an expert in the field and you are not. Perhaps therefore the reason I disdain Gove is because I understand fully just how badly he messed up and you do not?
I'm sorry if my gentle "pace" felt like hectoring - it was only meant as achnowledgement of your disagreeement. I agree that I know little about his impact on education and you are certainly far more expert. I'm something of an expert in the Defra field, though, and the general view of industry, NGOs and, up to a point, farmers is that he did a good job there. It's not as though I was politically aligned, and he didn't do everything my charity wanted either, but he was proactive and generally effective at achieving positive change.
Nick - my comment about 'hectoring' wasn't aimed at you! So your apology is nice, but not needed.
Jesus Christ. Will the last person to leave Britain pls turn out the lights. How on earth could everything go so wrong?
The wage crunch is the worst since 1850 apparently, which is even beyond Big G’s recollection.
Meanwhile, in "another sign that something's not right" news,
Five-year-olds in Britain are on average up to seven centimetres shorter than their peers in other wealthy nations, in a trend described as “pretty startling”.
A poor national diet has been highlighted as a major culprit in Britain’s fall down international rankings of child height...
“It’s quite clear we are falling behind, relative to Europe,” he added. “But it’s telling that at age five, we are looking further behind than we are at age 19, which suggests to me that the last 14 years from age five to 19 has been particularly rough for UK children.”
I was listening to Will Shirer's diaries (can't quite remember which one) where he describes the opening stages of the Second World War on the Western Front. In it he talks about the state of the British youth, malnourished, rickety, pigeon chested with bad eyesight and remarks that, in contrast to the Germans, the UK had spent the inter-war years neglecting their youth.
Going back to the Boer War, the state of the health of the urban working class was so shocking that even Parliament recognised that it was a serious national security issue.
Our national default is that we love our animals better than our children. When times are good, it's not so much a problem, there's enough to go around but when times are hard then the youth are neglected.
Go to any poor area and the result of the last decade of Tory spite and meanness is there in front of your eyes, many of the children either too thin or too fat, self evidently not properly nourished. Recall that policies such as the welfare cap and the two child rule are designed specifically to "remind parents that children cost money" ie to make sure that poor parents don't have enough money to raise their children properly. That is government policy. And it is utterly self defeating of course because these children will grow up to be less intelligent, less productive and more sickly adults and the whole country will be poorer.
The two child rule for welfare is entirely reasonable. Children are a choice to have, and both contraception and abortion are free of charge on the NHS.
If you already have two children, why should the taxpayer pay for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or more on welfare while those working for a living decide that more kids are unaffordable?
Kudos for defending the indefensible. Your rationale clarifies just how callous this policy is.
He’s right on this. A birth rate above the replacement rate is an unaffordable luxury for most of middle England. It’s really only viable for the very wealthy, or those with very low expectations in life who cream the welfare state.
You are putting "of course child raising is unaffordable" forward as a justification for cutting off welfare payments to children unfortunate enough to be born in unapproved families?
No, I don't think Child Benefit should be stopped in any families.
And its not stopped for anyone on welfare, nor the working poor who don't get welfare. If its insufficient, then why is that?
Because child benefit, which is not means tested, doesn't have a 2 child limit, unlike universal credit and working tax credits which actually aim to reduce poverty. So the government can subsidise the children of wealthy families they approve of, who wouldn't qualify for UC or WTC anyway, while punishing the poor families they don't approve of.
The wealthy don't get child benefit as its taxed past £50k. Indeed that's another distortion in taxes that I oppose, but that's another matter.
So child benefit is a benefit utilised by the working poor who don't get UC or WTC. Yet for some reason you think that should be minimised while giving another benefit elsewhere not aimed at children? Why?
If child benefits are needed for children, then utilise child benefit. That's literally what its there for. If you want to tax those who are wealthy, then tax wealth, or tax income, accordingly - don't take it out on children.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
A nation of homo floriensis with unsustainable mortgage payments and a Philip Schofield comeback to look forward to.
Lady Maths of the Rugby 🐟💙🇺🇦 @labourtandt · 36m Replying to @jessphillips One of our young neighbours have put reluctantly put their house on the market, they cant afford the rise in their mortgage repayment.
If you think @benstokes38 declaring on the first day was why we lost the Test match, you either know nothing about cricket or you’re Australian.
It certainly was why we lost the test. Whether Australia would have won it is more debatable.
The reason we lost was we didn't take the final 2 wickets.
The match went to its final hour, had we not declared in the first innings, we'd have had to declare in the 2nd innings anyway instead in order to have a chance of winning that we had.
On a similar theme, I surely cannot be the only one who cut back on energy use in the winter, not because I couldn’t afford to pay (I am fortunate enough to be able to do so) but because it felt like the right thing to do, and therefore basically won some extra cash I didn’t need in the form of the support payments.
There must be quite a few like me which can’t be helping with the cooling of demand the BoE is trying to do.
Why can you not now cut back on usage of stuff generally in exactly the same public spirited manner?
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
Perhaps I am being a bit thick here, but surely any subsidy for mortgage holders simply negates the point of putting up interest rates, and sets up further rises.
Apart from being a daft way to spend tax payers money.
Can you imagine the personal heartache that would cause? Hard working people ruined for life. I don't know the answer, but a couple of million people crushed forever is not politically astute.
This attitude perhaps goes to the crux of one of our problems as a nation. No American would think that if you overextend yourself financially and things go wrong, you are "ruined for life".
Indeed and the failure of Fanny Mae, Freddie Mack and Lehman Brothers with no intervention by Bush upset the world order. Your non interventionist ideology is as mad as Corbyn's intervene at any cost.
Lehman Brothers failed because it failed, not because of a lack of intervention.
Any intervention then would have stoked the bubble even more, and made the inevitable correction when it inevitably came again even worse, not better.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
No, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. You could try shaming them in the Spectator ? Or on Twitter ?
Lady Maths of the Rugby 🐟💙🇺🇦 @labourtandt · 36m Replying to @jessphillips One of our young neighbours have put reluctantly put their house on the market, they cant afford the rise in their mortgage repayment.
Jesus Christ. Will the last person to leave Britain pls turn out the lights. How on earth could everything go so wrong?
The wage crunch is the worst since 1850 apparently, which is even beyond Big G’s recollection.
Meanwhile, in "another sign that something's not right" news,
Five-year-olds in Britain are on average up to seven centimetres shorter than their peers in other wealthy nations, in a trend described as “pretty startling”.
A poor national diet has been highlighted as a major culprit in Britain’s fall down international rankings of child height...
“It’s quite clear we are falling behind, relative to Europe,” he added. “But it’s telling that at age five, we are looking further behind than we are at age 19, which suggests to me that the last 14 years from age five to 19 has been particularly rough for UK children.”
I was listening to Will Shirer's diaries (can't quite remember which one) where he describes the opening stages of the Second World War on the Western Front. In it he talks about the state of the British youth, malnourished, rickety, pigeon chested with bad eyesight and remarks that, in contrast to the Germans, the UK had spent the inter-war years neglecting their youth.
Going back to the Boer War, the state of the health of the urban working class was so shocking that even Parliament recognised that it was a serious national security issue.
Our national default is that we love our animals better than our children. When times are good, it's not so much a problem, there's enough to go around but when times are hard then the youth are neglected.
Go to any poor area and the result of the last decade of Tory spite and meanness is there in front of your eyes, many of the children either too thin or too fat, self evidently not properly nourished. Recall that policies such as the welfare cap and the two child rule are designed specifically to "remind parents that children cost money" ie to make sure that poor parents don't have enough money to raise their children properly. That is government policy. And it is utterly self defeating of course because these children will grow up to be less intelligent, less productive and more sickly adults and the whole country will be poorer.
The two child rule for welfare is entirely reasonable. Children are a choice to have, and both contraception and abortion are free of charge on the NHS.
If you already have two children, why should the taxpayer pay for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or more on welfare while those working for a living decide that more kids are unaffordable?
Kudos for defending the indefensible. Your rationale clarifies just how callous this policy is.
He’s right on this. A birth rate above the replacement rate is an unaffordable luxury for most of middle England. It’s really only viable for the very wealthy, or those with very low expectations in life who cream the welfare state.
You are putting "of course child raising is unaffordable" forward as a justification for cutting off welfare payments to children unfortunate enough to be born in unapproved families?
No, I don't think Child Benefit should be stopped in any families.
And its not stopped for anyone on welfare, nor the working poor who don't get welfare. If its insufficient, then why is that?
Because child benefit, which is not means tested, doesn't have a 2 child limit, unlike universal credit and working tax credits which actually aim to reduce poverty. So the government can subsidise the children of wealthy families they approve of, who wouldn't qualify for UC or WTC anyway, while punishing the poor families they don't approve of.
The wealthy don't get child benefit as its taxed past £50k. Indeed that's another distortion in taxes that I oppose, but that's another matter.
So child benefit is a benefit utilised by the working poor who don't get UC or WTC. Yet for some reason you think that should be minimised while giving another benefit elsewhere not aimed at children? Why?
If child benefits are needed for children, then utilise child benefit. That's literally what its there for. If you want to tax those who are wealthy, then tax wealth, or tax income, accordingly - don't take it out on children.
Taking it out on children is precisely what this 2 child policy does. Doesn't matter what you call the benefit, children in poorer families are deliberately penalised for being too many of the wrong kind of children.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
A nation of homo floriensis with unsustainable mortgage payments and a Philip Schofield comeback to look forward to.
We can have smaller houses though, with little doors, so that may help to ease the mortgage payments crisis.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
Think of it like having a baby.
We decided to have baby seven months before a weird terrorist group blew up all the nursery school buildings and around the same time all forms of nappies were rendered unusable via a bizarre form of intergalactic nappy-attacking laser beam
In retrospect, the timing of Brexit was sub optimal
The timing, manner, and basic fact of. But you're getting the idea.
I am starting to see the conditions in which the rejoin or re-entry into SM/CU debate really kicks off in the next couple of years.
The narrative - we gave it a go but we don’t have the luxury of keeping the experiment going when we could be boosting the economy with FOM/market access…
Prediction - second term Labour manifesto will have *something* in it about closer European alignment. Not sure what yet; but something.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
We'll never know. It's perfectly possible that had Brexit not happened and Europe had looked more stable Vlad would have weighed up his options differently. As for COVID - if that chef in Wuhan not been distracted by the footage of Theresa May bumbling about as PM, he may have let his bat stew could that crucial five minutes longer.
Perhaps I am being a bit thick here, but surely any subsidy for mortgage holders simply negates the point of putting up interest rates, and sets up further rises.
Apart from being a daft way to spend tax payers money.
Expressed more or less just as Hunt did. Probably correct.
But it's a politically fatal problem, so who knows what the government end up doing.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
We'll never know. It's perfectly possible that had Brexit not happened and Europe had looked more stable Vlad would have weighed up his options differently. As for COVID - if that chef in Wuhan not been distracted by the footage of Theresa May bumbling about as PM, he may have let his bat stew could that crucial five minutes longer.
I don't think there's much of a scientific basis for blaming Theresa May for Covid, but she's a bit of an arse so I'm going to support the theory.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Think of each notification as a penance for when you take the Rothermere coin.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
Jesus Christ. Will the last person to leave Britain pls turn out the lights. How on earth could everything go so wrong?
The wage crunch is the worst since 1850 apparently, which is even beyond Big G’s recollection.
Meanwhile, in "another sign that something's not right" news,
Five-year-olds in Britain are on average up to seven centimetres shorter than their peers in other wealthy nations, in a trend described as “pretty startling”.
A poor national diet has been highlighted as a major culprit in Britain’s fall down international rankings of child height...
“It’s quite clear we are falling behind, relative to Europe,” he added. “But it’s telling that at age five, we are looking further behind than we are at age 19, which suggests to me that the last 14 years from age five to 19 has been particularly rough for UK children.”
I was listening to Will Shirer's diaries (can't quite remember which one) where he describes the opening stages of the Second World War on the Western Front. In it he talks about the state of the British youth, malnourished, rickety, pigeon chested with bad eyesight and remarks that, in contrast to the Germans, the UK had spent the inter-war years neglecting their youth.
Going back to the Boer War, the state of the health of the urban working class was so shocking that even Parliament recognised that it was a serious national security issue.
Our national default is that we love our animals better than our children. When times are good, it's not so much a problem, there's enough to go around but when times are hard then the youth are neglected.
Go to any poor area and the result of the last decade of Tory spite and meanness is there in front of your eyes, many of the children either too thin or too fat, self evidently not properly nourished. Recall that policies such as the welfare cap and the two child rule are designed specifically to "remind parents that children cost money" ie to make sure that poor parents don't have enough money to raise their children properly. That is government policy. And it is utterly self defeating of course because these children will grow up to be less intelligent, less productive and more sickly adults and the whole country will be poorer.
The two child rule for welfare is entirely reasonable. Children are a choice to have, and both contraception and abortion are free of charge on the NHS.
If you already have two children, why should the taxpayer pay for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or more on welfare while those working for a living decide that more kids are unaffordable?
Kudos for defending the indefensible. Your rationale clarifies just how callous this policy is.
He’s right on this. A birth rate above the replacement rate is an unaffordable luxury for most of middle England. It’s really only viable for the very wealthy, or those with very low expectations in life who cream the welfare state.
You are putting "of course child raising is unaffordable" forward as a justification for cutting off welfare payments to children unfortunate enough to be born in unapproved families?
No, I don't think Child Benefit should be stopped in any families.
And its not stopped for anyone on welfare, nor the working poor who don't get welfare. If its insufficient, then why is that?
Because child benefit, which is not means tested, doesn't have a 2 child limit, unlike universal credit and working tax credits which actually aim to reduce poverty. So the government can subsidise the children of wealthy families they approve of, who wouldn't qualify for UC or WTC anyway, while punishing the poor families they don't approve of.
The wealthy don't get child benefit as its taxed past £50k. Indeed that's another distortion in taxes that I oppose, but that's another matter.
So child benefit is a benefit utilised by the working poor who don't get UC or WTC. Yet for some reason you think that should be minimised while giving another benefit elsewhere not aimed at children? Why?
If child benefits are needed for children, then utilise child benefit. That's literally what its there for. If you want to tax those who are wealthy, then tax wealth, or tax income, accordingly - don't take it out on children.
Taking it out on children is precisely what this 2 child policy does. Doesn't matter what you call the benefit, children in poorer families are deliberately penalised for being too many of the wrong kind of children.
No, they're not, since they still get child benefit, just as poor working parents get.
If UC is meant to be an insurance for wages, then it makes no sense to include children in the mix, since wages aren't set based on how many children an employee has.
Why should a working family who are poor and don't get welfare get less support for their third and fourth etc children than those who are poor and do?
If support for children is needed, then that's what child benefit is for.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Your first mistake was visiting their site in the first place Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
Perhaps I am being a bit thick here, but surely any subsidy for mortgage holders simply negates the point of putting up interest rates, and sets up further rises.
Apart from being a daft way to spend tax payers money.
Yes, but you don't have to convince us, you have to convince an electorate which perceives the role of govt in general and Rishi in particular as being to Help Out.
Bear in mind most people do not understand what inflation is. They think halving it from 10% to 5% means prices coming down by 5 or for all I know 50, %.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Your first mistake was visiting their site in the first place Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
And fourthly, I am the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bogota.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Your first mistake was visiting their site in the first place Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
And fourthly, I am the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bogota.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
I have a horrible horrible feeling that this is going the way of actual mortgage support payments. Just like the energy support payments. And the covid support payments.
It seems any time we hit negative economic situations now the government just throws (generally non means tested) money at it to paper over the cracks. This will make the eventual implosion even more catastrophic when it comes.
Agreed. Paying people's mortgages for them would be utter lunacy.
I just don't understand what it would achieve. It wouldn't ultimately fix the problem of a shortage of housing. It might keep people in their houses, which is not negligible, but it would bugger their ability to move quickly.
I would have said if they go down that route there would have to be some kind of debt for equity swap. As in, the government takes on your mortgage if you like but you now live in, in effect, a council house.
But there won't be. It would just be free money.
Very nice for me and my sister if it happens as we're about to sell our father's house and that should clear our mortgages - so instead, we can use that money for other things and get our rather nice houses paid for by the government.
But should the government be subsidising people in that situation? Hell no.
The issue is successive governments since Thatcher have hoodwinked generations of workers into believing they are better off because their house has gained in value even if their wages didn't rise, so they only way in the UK to actually get wealthier is to keep climbing up the chain of properties, swinging from one mortgage to the next, in the hope that one day you own a house that you can then downsize from, creating liquidity with every swing down to smaller and smaller properties, giving the capital injection to secure you in your old age. This was sold to me as the only way to live from a pretty young age - get on the property ladder, get a job, get married and have kids, you're a success if you do all that before 30. Well, lots of people now can't do that, and no other solution has been presented; and those who did do that were typically those who came from somewhat well off backgrounds but not excessively privileged ones, so if it stops working you have a bourgeoise revolt. I think one of the things we can see from how quickly Truss' fell is that a decade of Conservatives making most people poorer was fine until it hit the class of people who write, edit and produce the news and politics - that upper middle class who probably have a mortgage they can only just afford but it is an important stepping stone. Fuck them over too much and, politically, you are really in trouble.
Cameron put those people in alliance with OAPs and social moderates / economic conservatives. May upset the OAPs, and didn't replace them, Johnson upset the social moderates, but replaced them with some working class social conservatives and got back OAPs, and Truss lost everyone. Sunak has done a bit better with OAPs and the social moderates (although I think the culture war stuff will lose them), and the culture war stuff doesn't seem to be enough to keep working class social conservatives (who feel the economic pain more acutely), so the last group left to try to appeal too will be bourgeoise mortgage holders.
Before Thatcher even, perhaps. Memories of being a youngster c. 1980 having the Property Ladder explained clearly but emphatically to me, with appropriate hand gestures, left and right hands moving up alternately, by the very middle class father of a friend: that father and mother used to spend much of their time buying a new house to live in, doing it up, and moving on and upwards. Now?
Also your comment reminds me oif a railway historian observing that the railways which used to get most stick included the lines out of Blackfriars and so on. Because those were the commuter routes out to SE London/Kent where lots of Fleet Street journos had their 1920s and 1930s semi.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Do you honestly think the effect of Brexit is similar to the pandemic?
Perhaps I am being a bit thick here, but surely any subsidy for mortgage holders simply negates the point of putting up interest rates, and sets up further rises.
Apart from being a daft way to spend tax payers money.
Expressed more or less just as Hunt did. Probably correct.
But it's a politically fatal problem, so who knows what the government end up doing.
Yes, and this was also the issue with the Truss knee-jerk energy policy last autumn.
Without giving Truss credit (because she deserves none) her instinct around energy bill support expressed during the campaign was probably right. The fact she got bounced into providing universal assistance probably a fear of missing out on a honeymoon (hilarious in hindsight) and presiding over a terrible winter. In actuality, targeted support was probably the right way to deal with it, rather than a universal bung.
But the government doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore, and the Tory Party is absolutely petrified it is staring down the barrel of a cataclysm in 2024. It is desperate to shore up any support it can get; so throwing money at the problem to give it a reprieve from the immediate crisis starts to look appealing.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Your first mistake was visiting their site in the first place Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
And fourthly, I am the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bogota.
I'm not an economist, but I have a few friends who are (one did an actuarial degree and that never made sense to me) and they are big MMT proponents. From my limited understanding, their argument for how to deal with current inflation is just wealth redistribution - that taxes are not about "balancing the books" but instead to keep money flowing in the system, and the easiest way to do that would be to take it from the piles of money hoarded by the rich and give it to the poor who will spend it immediately on goods they need - this reduces excess profit seeking (because what's the point of too much profit if the gov is going to just take it away anyway) and solves any crisis in spending power for lower earners. It also stimulates growth - again, if you give poor people a pound they will spend it, if you give a rich person a pound it will sit and accrue interest because it will likely just be invested in inflated assets (housing and stocks). Outside of a moral argument (protestant work ethic people saying people should earn their money need not apply), is this viable economics?
It’s only viable economics, if one defines ‘rich’ a lot lower on the income scale than most politicians can get away with. One might also argue that this is exactly what’s in place already with the 40% tax bracket, many of whom, especially in areas of expensive housing, don’t think of themselves as particularly well-off.
If you try and define ‘rich’ as the top 1%, and expect to be able to extract healthy amounts of tax from them, then you run into international mobility, and willingness to forego economic activity in favour of more leisure time. The only members of the 1% who can’t do an awful lot of tax planning, are Premier League footballers.
So when the economy implodes and inflation is low and growth is poor causing a recession, the poor have to shoulder the burden via austerity.
When the economy implodes and inflation is high, the Bank of England should CAUSE a recession, forcing the poor to have less purchasing power and less job security, shouldering the burden anyway.
Why do we have this economic system? Like, it isn't a force of nature, we designed things this way - why is it talked about as if these aren't political decisions to allow rich people to stay rich and poor people to get poorer? It's obscene...
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Perhaps 0.2% to 0.3% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit.
The pandemic is perhaps about 49.9% and the war in Ukraine is about 49.9%
Can you imagine the personal heartache that would cause? Hard working people ruined for life. I don't know the answer, but a couple of million people crushed forever is not politically astute.
This attitude perhaps goes to the crux of one of our problems as a nation. No American would think that if you overextend yourself financially and things go wrong, you are "ruined for life".
Indeed and the failure of Fanny Mae, Freddie Mack and Lehman Brothers with no intervention by Bush upset the world order. Your non interventionist ideology is as mad as Corbyn's intervene at any cost.
Lehman Brothers failed because it failed, not because of a lack of intervention.
Any intervention then would have stoked the bubble even more, and made the inevitable correction when it inevitably came again even worse, not better.
RBS failed and it was bailed out. I accept you disagreed with this at the time, but Brown by saving RBS saved an awful lot more heartache than we saw.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
A nation of homo floriensis with unsustainable mortgage payments and a Philip Schofield comeback to look forward to.
We can have smaller houses though, with little doors, so that may help to ease the mortgage payments crisis.
We already have the smaller houses. Some of which are knowingly designed to be too small for Homo sapiens. Especially in the southern Shires.
(Some of the bedrooms need special small beds to look good for estate agency photos. Which reminds me that for many years Mrs C and I had an inherited narrow double bed Scots style, designed to fit into a bed recess in the typical Victorian tenement flat. But that was just cosy. Those EA beds - you couldn't get ****ing Frodo and Bilbo in at the same time.)
Can you imagine the personal heartache that would cause? Hard working people ruined for life. I don't know the answer, but a couple of million people crushed forever is not politically astute.
This attitude perhaps goes to the crux of one of our problems as a nation. No American would think that if you overextend yourself financially and things go wrong, you are "ruined for life".
Indeed and the failure of Fanny Mae, Freddie Mack and Lehman Brothers with no intervention by Bush upset the world order. Your non interventionist ideology is as mad as Corbyn's intervene at any cost.
Lehman Brothers failed because it failed, not because of a lack of intervention.
Any intervention then would have stoked the bubble even more, and made the inevitable correction when it inevitably came again even worse, not better.
RBS failed and it was bailed out. I accept you disagreed with this at the time, but Brown by saving RBS saved an awful lot more heartache than we saw.
While causing a lot more heartache that was entirely unnecessary.
People act as if every failed business can be saved and never allowed to die. If you do that, you just end up with an economy of zombie businesses that have failed but are getting kept alive by taxpayers and the problems are never rectified as you're not letting them just die.
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Your first mistake was visiting their site in the first place Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
And fourthly, I am the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bogota.
You are? How is one to address you?
A George Brown, later George-Brown, gag.
Probably apocryphal, but one of my favourite political tales.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Perhaps 0.2% to 0.3% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit.
The pandemic is perhaps about 49.9% and the war in Ukraine is about 49.9%
I rather suspect your figures, not least because we haven't even Brexited properly in terms of customs and all that. Rememnber that £43 Gov ernment levy on every single consignment coming from furrin lands aka rEurope - it hasn't kicked in yet. No skin off a Sainsbury 40 tonner of Polish chicken, but one and one's customers are ****ed for small consignments such as car spares.
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Do you honestly think the effect of Brexit is similar to the pandemic?
Yes, and before your damascene conversion so would you.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
Brexit is part of this but it’s a whole host of issues - most of them predating Brexit - which are to blame. Plus Covid and the War (both bigger than Brexit in their negative effects)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
A nation of homo floriensis with unsustainable mortgage payments and a Philip Schofield comeback to look forward to.
We can have smaller houses though, with little doors, so that may help to ease the mortgage payments crisis.
We already have the smaller houses. Some of which are knowingly designed to be too small for Homo sapiens. Especially in the southern Shires.
(Some of the bedrooms need special small beds to look good for estate agency photos. Which reminds me that for many years Mrs C and I had an inherited narrow double bed Scots style, designed to fit into a bed recess in the typical Victorian tenement flat. But that was just cosy. Those EA beds - you couldn't get ****ing Frodo and Bilbo in at the same time.)
If you want to really annoy an estate agent, measure your key pieces of furniture, and turn up with a tape measure at the viewing, to measure the pieces of furniture in the house you’re looking at. Yes, they have a ‘double bed’ made, that’s 3” shorter and 3” narrower than yours, especially for new development show houses.
I'm not an economist, but I have a few friends who are (one did an actuarial degree and that never made sense to me) and they are big MMT proponents. From my limited understanding, their argument for how to deal with current inflation is just wealth redistribution - that taxes are not about "balancing the books" but instead to keep money flowing in the system, and the easiest way to do that would be to take it from the piles of money hoarded by the rich and give it to the poor who will spend it immediately on goods they need - this reduces excess profit seeking (because what's the point of too much profit if the gov is going to just take it away anyway) and solves any crisis in spending power for lower earners. It also stimulates growth - again, if you give poor people a pound they will spend it, if you give a rich person a pound it will sit and accrue interest because it will likely just be invested in inflated assets (housing and stocks). Outside of a moral argument (protestant work ethic people saying people should earn their money need not apply), is this viable economics?
It’s only viable economics, if one defines ‘rich’ a lot lower on the income scale than most politicians can get away with. One might also argue that this is exactly what’s in place already with the 40% tax bracket, many of whom, especially in areas of expensive housing, don’t think of themselves as particularly well-off.
If you try and define ‘rich’ as the top 1%, and expect to be able to extract healthy amounts of tax from them, then you run into international mobility, and willingness to forego economic activity in favour of more leisure time. The only members of the 1% who can’t do an awful lot of tax planning, are Premier League footballers.
Isn't £80k a year like the top 5% of earners? Sure, they may not be super wealthy, but having functioning infrastructure benefits them. And aren't most of the worst tax loopholes in territories the UK kinda controls anyway?
I just don't understand how, if you want to create any kind of illusion of capitalist democracy being anything other than wealth extraction from the labouring classes to the already wealthy, you can justify this? Sure - the USSR doesn't exist anymore, history ended, capitalists don't feel the need to give scraps to social safety nets for fear of unionisation or mass revolt as they won the war of hegemony. But, just as a survival instinct, this level of inequality and constant disruption is not good for elites either! At some point civil society will break, and you can't feed yourself on cash if no one plants or harvests the food - or if the fields are fallow because of drought or flood...
I do not understand rich people, or those who point at "the market" like it is anything other than just the decisions and impacts of the decisions made by rich people...
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Do you honestly think the effect of Brexit is similar to the pandemic?
Yes, and before your damascene conversion so would you.
Then you're delusional.
I wonder what kind of Brexit Sweden underwent to currently have 9.7% inflation?
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Perhaps 0.2% to 0.3% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit.
The pandemic is perhaps about 49.9% and the war in Ukraine is about 49.9%
The US has Covid but not Ukraine as a material factor - inflation 4% The EU has Covid & Ukraine but not Brexit as a material factor - inflation 6.1% The UK has all - inflation 8.1%
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Do you honestly think the effect of Brexit is similar to the pandemic?
Yes, and before your damascene conversion so would you.
You seem, uncharacteristically, to have lost your sense of proportion
If I appear unusually gloomy, it’s not just the abyss of doom into which Britain is plunging - it’s also the fact I am still getting ruinously annoying Daily Mail notifications. Absolutely nothing - not even erasing chrome and reinstalling - fixes it. They are like cockroaches in a nuclear winter
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
I take it you've tried:
Settings->Privacy and Security->Site Settings
I've tried EVERYTHING - but thanks
So you've tried formatting your PC back to factory settings and clean installing your browsers? 🤔
Norman Lamont says the financial chaos is not due to Brexit. Hooray.
Actually a former member of the Bank of England Committee said on Sophie on Sunday that the financial chaos is rooted in covid and Ukraine and only in part Brexit
For you, Lamont and Ridge's guest there are 30 other economic commentators who do blame Brexit.
He did reference Brexit but covid and the war in Ukraine are the main drivers
I agree. Perhaps 20% of 30% of the current cost of living increases are due to Brexit. You might say it was a mistake to vote for something with a similar effect to the worst pandemic of recent times and the first full scale war in Europe in 80 years.
Do you honestly think the effect of Brexit is similar to the pandemic?
I'm talking economic effects on the UK. The war in Ukraine is obviously having a much bigger economic effect on Ukraine itself. The pandemic had a big immediate effect obviously, but that's winding down somewhat now. Brexit continues an incremental effect.
So when the economy implodes and inflation is low and growth is poor causing a recession, the poor have to shoulder the burden via austerity.
When the economy implodes and inflation is high, the Bank of England should CAUSE a recession, forcing the poor to have less purchasing power and less job security, shouldering the burden anyway.
Why do we have this economic system? Like, it isn't a force of nature, we designed things this way - why is it talked about as if these aren't political decisions to allow rich people to stay rich and poor people to get poorer? It's obscene...
Because the system, if it is working properly, is the least worst option.
By working properly, I mean that there is support to allow those at the bottom to climb up the ladder, and protections in place to stop abuses from occurring at the top.
At the moment, it is hard to say that our system in the UK is working as well as it could be…. For a myriad of reasons I would blame on successive governments of all colours.
We are fucked, aren’t we? Fucked in a different way to America, but fucked, nonetheless
You won!
Get Over It...
How many problems predate 2016 and how many problems are shared by our peers?
Doesn’t matter. Brexit is getting the blame. Lol.
The EU was blamed for everything until 2016 Brexit will be blamed for everything after 2016
A certain justice in that
That's a false equivalence. The EU was a bogeyman; Brexit is a scapegoat.
Tenses, tenses. Bogeymen are dead scapegoats.
No, there's a qualitative difference between the way that obsessive Eurosceptics saw creeping federalism as a threat to be opposed and the way that obsessive Remainers see Brexit as the cause of literally everything that is wrong with the world.
Comments
“We can only stay here for four days, in order to have a longer stay this summer. These new post-Brexit travel rules are driving us mad and killing our dolce vita. We’re second-home owners, we should be treated differently from other Brit tourists. This cottage has cost us a fortune to restyle. We thought we were going to spend our future life here,” says Tony, who used to work at a software company...."
https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1671425141249638402
If you think @benstokes38 declaring on the first day was why we lost the Test match, you either know nothing about cricket or you’re Australian.
ProPublica asked about Alito’s travel. He replied in the Wall Street Journal.
Questioned about an undisclosed fishing trip hosted by a GOP billionaire, the Supreme Court justice instead shared his rebuttal in a rival media outlet — before the investigative journalists could publish their scoop
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/21/alito-wsj-propublica-fishing-trip/
I am not content with anyone suffering mental health issues not least from the critical mental health issues my eldest in Canada has gone through
As with all these things they’re horrible and unpleasant if you’re left holding the baby at the time you were hoping to cash out/need the remortgage, but that is the concept of an investment. It goes down as well as up.
The very frustrating thing was the wilful fantasy from all involved that low interest rates were forever and that they weren’t bashing people about the head with warnings that they could really come a cropper. This looks especially scandalous given the cause of the last financial crisis.
Did you not learn anything from the Truss debacle ?
Get Over It...
I think very clever from SKS.
On the other hand, I made what seems to be a good decision. So why should I not be supported too?
(hint, I'm no sure if I should, but it would seem unfair if some people got payouts but not others)
In the end who cares. We’re fucketty fucked
I particularly like the news that we are now 5 inches shorter than anyone else. It seems superbly apt
I remain (maybe optimistically given their recent performance) hopeful they won't do this so on that basis broadly concur 5.5 to 6.0%.
We are definitely in a world of Stagflation at the moment but nothing is going to fix that without a recession. And even that may not reduce wage inflation...
There must be quite a few like me which can’t be helping with the cooling of demand the BoE is trying to do.
In retrospect, the timing of Brexit was sub optimal
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/may/19/ukcrime.tonythompson
But you're getting the idea.
I'm sorry if you thought it was...
So child benefit is a benefit utilised by the working poor who don't get UC or WTC. Yet for some reason you think that should be minimised while giving another benefit elsewhere not aimed at children? Why?
If child benefits are needed for children, then utilise child benefit. That's literally what its there for. If you want to tax those who are wealthy, then tax wealth, or tax income, accordingly - don't take it out on children.
The match went to its final hour, had we not declared in the first innings, we'd have had to declare in the 2nd innings anyway instead in order to have a chance of winning that we had.
I thought some of you might appreciate the irony
Apart from being a daft way to spend tax payers money.
Any intervention then would have stoked the bubble even more, and made the inevitable correction when it inevitably came again even worse, not better.
You could try shaming them in the Spectator ? Or on Twitter ?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/21/britain-mortgage-banks-bailout-profits-homeowners
The narrative - we gave it a go but we don’t have the luxury of keeping the experiment going when we could be boosting the economy with FOM/market access…
Prediction - second term Labour manifesto will have *something* in it about closer European alignment. Not sure what yet; but something.
Probably correct.
But it's a politically fatal problem, so who knows what the government end up doing.
If UC is meant to be an insurance for wages, then it makes no sense to include children in the mix, since wages aren't set based on how many children an employee has.
Why should a working family who are poor and don't get welfare get less support for their third and fourth etc children than those who are poor and do?
If support for children is needed, then that's what child benefit is for.
Your second mistake was having fat fingers and pressing Allow instead of Oh God No Fuck Right Off
Your third mistake is assuming we prefer manic Leon to gloomy Leon
Bear in mind most people do not understand what inflation is. They think halving it from 10% to 5% means prices coming down by 5 or for all I know 50, %.
Settings->Privacy and Security->Site Settings
Also your comment reminds me oif a railway historian observing that the railways which used to get most stick included the lines out of Blackfriars and so on. Because those were the commuter routes out to SE London/Kent where lots of Fleet Street journos had their 1920s and 1930s semi.
Without giving Truss credit (because she deserves none) her instinct around energy bill support expressed during the campaign was probably right. The fact she got bounced into providing universal assistance probably a fear of missing out on a honeymoon (hilarious in hindsight) and presiding over a terrible winter. In actuality, targeted support was probably the right way to deal with it, rather than a universal bung.
But the government doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore, and the Tory Party is absolutely petrified it is staring down the barrel of a cataclysm in 2024. It is desperate to shore up any support it can get; so throwing money at the problem to give it a reprieve from the immediate crisis starts to look appealing.
If you try and define ‘rich’ as the top 1%, and expect to be able to extract healthy amounts of tax from them, then you run into international mobility, and willingness to forego economic activity in favour of more leisure time. The only members of the 1% who can’t do an awful lot of tax planning, are Premier League footballers.
When the economy implodes and inflation is high, the Bank of England should CAUSE a recession, forcing the poor to have less purchasing power and less job security, shouldering the burden anyway.
Why do we have this economic system? Like, it isn't a force of nature, we designed things this way - why is it talked about as if these aren't political decisions to allow rich people to stay rich and poor people to get poorer? It's obscene...
The pandemic is perhaps about 49.9% and the war in Ukraine is about 49.9%
Brexit will be blamed for everything after 2016
A certain justice in that
(Some of the bedrooms need special small beds to look good for estate agency photos. Which reminds me that for many years Mrs C and I had an inherited narrow double bed Scots style, designed to fit into a bed recess in the typical Victorian tenement flat. But that was just cosy. Those EA beds - you couldn't get ****ing Frodo and Bilbo in at the same time.)
People act as if every failed business can be saved and never allowed to die. If you do that, you just end up with an economy of zombie businesses that have failed but are getting kept alive by taxpayers and the problems are never rectified as you're not letting them just die.
I just don't understand how, if you want to create any kind of illusion of capitalist democracy being anything other than wealth extraction from the labouring classes to the already wealthy, you can justify this? Sure - the USSR doesn't exist anymore, history ended, capitalists don't feel the need to give scraps to social safety nets for fear of unionisation or mass revolt as they won the war of hegemony. But, just as a survival instinct, this level of inequality and constant disruption is not good for elites either! At some point civil society will break, and you can't feed yourself on cash if no one plants or harvests the food - or if the fields are fallow because of drought or flood...
I do not understand rich people, or those who point at "the market" like it is anything other than just the decisions and impacts of the decisions made by rich people...
I wonder what kind of Brexit Sweden underwent to currently have 9.7% inflation?
The EU has Covid & Ukraine but not Brexit as a material factor - inflation 6.1%
The UK has all - inflation 8.1%
By working properly, I mean that there is support to allow those at the bottom to climb up the ladder, and protections in place to stop abuses from occurring at the top.
At the moment, it is hard to say that our system in the UK is working as well as it could be…. For a myriad of reasons I would blame on successive governments of all colours.