@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
Rishi needs to start piling the failures of Brexit firmly at Boris's door. Emphasize that it was nice idea comprehensively cocked up by Boris, his incompetence and his egotism. The Boris myth must be destroyed for all the Tories' sake, and Brexit is the perfect place to start.
Who would he be kidding apart from himself ? The conservatives are failing because they dont have conservative policies and the voters can see that.
The voters think the Conservatives aren't conservative enough, so they're going to vote Labour instead?
Conservative voters are simply going to stay at home, theres no enthusiasm for what they are doing
If we joined the Euro we'd be in the ECB. The addition of Kyiv in a few years will keep it generally poor enough to maintain a generally weaker Euro compared to a western Europe only deal and we'd have lower interest rates courtesy of the ECB.
What's not to like
Interest rates for savers.
They've got all the world's stock markets to invest in.
Pulpy, it's absolutely bog standard advice not to put all your savings in the stock market.
(a) people with not very much anyway - their emergency fund has lost 10%++ of its value, even if they don't draw on it (b) people who don't have the risk appetite and/or knowledge you do (c) people who are coming up to old age and need to move out of equities (old rule of thumb, deduct your age from 100 and don't have more than that percentage in equities)
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
I think he's referring to senior civil servants, judges and heads of quangos and coporates. Who never seem to get sacked, aren't accountable, yet wield the power to contradict elected politicians and even topple them. Suella Braverman isn't a member of the elite - she can't even get a plane to Rwanda.
Yes, try and find a socially conservative, pro Brexit senior civil servant, judge or head of a quango or even FTSE 100 company
Could you please list the senior civil servants, judges, heads of quangos and FTSE100 companies and their political ideologies, please? Asking for a forum.
See the number of FTSE 100 directors who signed a letter opposing Brexit or the SC's rulings against Boris or civil servants briefings v Braverman and Patel
Remain but I am not pretending to be an anti elite rebel.
The real anti elite rebels are the few who are Socialists, voted for Corbyn but also voted Leave and still back Brexit and are religious social conservatives.
Everyone else is still largely in agreement with today's UK elite on at least half the issues
Religious, socially conservative, Corbynite leavers ... that's quite a niche group of people you're homing in on there.
@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
For the merest billionth of a second I considered watching QT with the all Leave-voting audience tonight. But I can't. It's too tragic. An audience of bewildered people, all betrayed by the super-rich elites and disaster capitalists who desired and funded Brexit, who filled their heads with cakeism and unicorns, who begat Johnson and the Trussterfuck, who are gradually, bitterly, comprehending that Project Fear is the new reality.
As JO'B says 'Compassion for the conned, contempt for the conmen'. I don't want to watch the conned flailing around like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket tonight. They gleefully voted for their own impoverishment and exploitation. I can't watch.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Though what I don't understand is why the New Statesman has belatedly decided to join in, running pieces this week about "15 minute cities are an elitist plot" and "everything is the fault of centrist Waterstones Dads". Insulting your core readership is an... interesting strategy?
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didnt drive anywhere,
I used to drive my mother's Fiat 127 when I was 12. I used to put a pebble on the drive so I could put it back in exactly the same place.
I'm in the middle of selling my late mother's house and desperately hoping that the buyers don't pull out in the face of rising mortgage rates.
If they already have an offer the bank/building society have to honour it. It does incentivise everyone to try and get the sale through ASAP though - if the offer expires then all bets are off.
Obviously doesn’t help if they’re on a tracker rather than fix but I think in the current situation fixing for at least a year or two probably adviseable - rates aren’t going to crash down overnight.
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didnt drive anywhere,
I used to drive my mother's Fiat 127 when I was 12. I used to put a pebble on the drive so I could put it back in exactly the same place.
Did you remember to do the same with the seat adjustment?
If we joined the Euro we'd be in the ECB. The addition of Kyiv in a few years will keep it generally poor enough to maintain a generally weaker Euro compared to a western Europe only deal and we'd have lower interest rates courtesy of the ECB.
What's not to like
Interest rates for savers.
They've got all the world's stock markets to invest in.
Pulpy, it's absolutely bog standard advice not to put all your savings in the stock market.
(a) people with not very much anyway - their emergency fund has lost 10%++ of its value, even if they don't draw on it (b) people who don't have the risk appetite and/or knowledge you do (c) people who are coming up to old age and need to move out of equities (old rule of thumb, deduct your age from 100 and don't have more than that percentage in equities)
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didn't drive anywhere,
I'm about the same age, and did indeed go for a drive in Ireland around fifty years ago (in the passenger seat) on holiday. FWIW.
The European Regional Development Fund was set up largely at the behest of Italy and the UK (us because we were large budget contributors under CAP, and it gave us a way to get money back). So although I don't have any figures either, it seems that we had a number of regions which were beneficiaries, and that Italy was a major beneficiary too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Regional_Development_Fund#History
Other than Ireland, everyone else was pretty well off in comparison.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didnt drive anywhere,
I used to drive my mother's Fiat 127 when I was 12. I used to put a pebble on the drive so I could put it back in exactly the same place.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Though what I don't understand is why the New Statesman has belatedly decided to join in, running pieces this week about "15 minute cities are an elitist plot" and "everything is the fault of centrist Waterstones Dads". Insulting your core readership is an... interesting strategy?
Had never heard of Waterstones Dads, but this seems to be the fons et origo on investigation:
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
Labour has put out its mortgage policy today, which in parts seems to mirror extremely closely what I've long been suggesting about forbearance help being reversable and no credit score impact. This is also what I hope to see govt pursue with banks as well as stopping them margin boosting. https://twitter.com/MartinSLewis/status/1671789494918434818
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
The liberal elite won the culture war, we have homosexual marriage, abortion near on demand up to 24 weeks, Pride days even in corporations, religious teachers sacked for teaching traditional views of gender and sexuality, migration to the UK higher than ever before even despite Brexit, statues being pulled down in big cities and museums. Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate the ranks of academia, the civil service, lawyers, big corporations and TV news from the BBC to Channel 4.
Even the economic argument the right was alleged to have won is looking shaky with the tax burden high and likely to get even higher under a Starmer government, increasing public spending and things which were privatised like railways now being drawn up by stealth under public ownership. While the Unions are shaking their fists again and striking for huge wage rises.
The elite is also different, the rich list in the Sunday Times is now mainly self made entrepreneurs, whereas in the early 1980s it was mainly landowners and inherited wealth. Public schools are now seeing pupils being rejected from Oxbridge more than ever, with 65% of Oxford and 70% of Cambridge students from state schools and even most Tory MPs now state educated.
"Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate..." - views. Opinions. Political positions. Not ability to enact wide or systemic change. Just "people who are in the modern middle class hold different opinions to people in the old middle class and old upper class". That's what this is all about.
Same sex marriage is conservative - yes it was important for same sex couples to have the same rights as any married couples, to visit the ill, to inherit, to live together - but it essentially assimilation into the heteronormative tradition. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" used to be about difference, not assimilation. Abortion is still illegal without 2 doctors signing off on it in this country. And again, dog whistle with "religious teachers" because you don't want a Muslim to teach students fundamental Islamism - you want a specific brand of traditional Christianity imposed on kids.
Starmer is going out with his shadow chancellor on TV every day saying that he won't do anything radical on the economy because of the "economic condition". A majority of TORY voters want public ownership of necessary utilities, and the Labour party is STILL ruling it out.
You call lefties permanent victims, and then complain that the poors are being allowed into the posh people unis, and that new money are lauded like some kind of Victorian Whig. We live in the world created by Thatcherism and Reaganism, by the neoliberal consensus, by capital and capitalism. You won; get over it.
I'm in the middle of selling my late mother's house and desperately hoping that the buyers don't pull out in the face of rising mortgage rates.
If they already have an offer the bank/building society have to honour it. It does incentivise everyone to try and get the sale through ASAP though - if the offer expires then all bets are off.
Obviously doesn’t help if they’re on a tracker rather than fix but I think in the current situation fixing for at least a year or two probably adviseable - rates aren’t going to crash down overnight.
It was predicted yesterday rates will not fall before 2025 at the earliest and let's not forget the BOE are not finished yet
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
In more acute form, you see the problem in a lot of middle Eastern societies, of graduates without the jobs that historically went to graduates.
I really should have fixed my mortgage for a decade. Still, five years is going to make a big difference.
Luckily I did. Last September at 3.45% I don't know what prompted me to. Just a feeling about Truss and the general economy, but I came back from holiday last year and fixed in early September for a decade. No IFA or anything. Just logged on and took the 10 year fixed that was offered.
I think doing this might've prevented otherwise serious financial hardship had I left it on standard variable (or even took a shorter deal at a lower rate).
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didnt drive anywhere,
I used to drive my mother's Fiat 127 when I was 12. I used to put a pebble on the drive so I could put it back in exactly the same place.
What did you do about the smell of burning rubber and clutch ?
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
I agree and it needs to be stopped and I am a pensioner and benefit from it
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didnt drive anywhere,
I used to drive my mother's Fiat 127 when I was 12. I used to put a pebble on the drive so I could put it back in exactly the same place.
Did you remember to do the same with the seat adjustment?
I don't recall adjusting the seat at all. It's possible that I didn't know seats could be adjusted or, as it was a 70s Fiat, the adjustment mechanism had corroded into immobility within the first six months of ownership.
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didn't drive anywhere,
I'm about the same age, and did indeed go for a drive in Ireland around fifty years ago (in the passenger seat) on holiday. FWIW.
The European Regional Development Fund was set up largely at the behest of Italy and the UK (us because we were large budget contributors under CAP, and it gave us a way to get money back). So although I don't have any figures either, it seems that we had a number of regions which were beneficiaries, and that Italy was a major beneficiary too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Regional_Development_Fund#History
Other than Ireland, everyone else was pretty well off in comparison.
Ireland and Italy had the poorest regions . The UKs poorest region was NI and still is.
IThers not much to suggest we have "flourished" in the EU,. The only areas which could make tha claim are London and the South East, the rest of the country has had slow decline .
If we joined the Euro we'd be in the ECB. The addition of Kyiv in a few years will keep it generally poor enough to maintain a generally weaker Euro compared to a western Europe only deal and we'd have lower interest rates courtesy of the ECB.
What's not to like
Interest rates for savers.
They've got all the world's stock markets to invest in.
Pulpy, it's absolutely bog standard advice not to put all your savings in the stock market.
(a) people with not very much anyway - their emergency fund has lost 10%++ of its value, even if they don't draw on it (b) people who don't have the risk appetite and/or knowledge you do (c) people who are coming up to old age and need to move out of equities (old rule of thumb, deduct your age from 100 and don't have more than that percentage in equities)
Got 3.85 already with RCI who actually upped their rates without needing to be asked, too (and might yet again for all I know).
Still, that's only half inflation. But it's a damn sight better than some of the other banks. And if you are old or not able to use the net and can't get to a branch of a bank which does offer a decent rate, you are even more screwed.
I really should have fixed my mortgage for a decade. Still, five years is going to make a big difference.
Luckily I did. Last September at 3.45% I don't know what prompted me to. Just a feeling about Truss and the general economy, but I came back from holiday last year and fixed in early September for a decade. No IFA or anything. Just logged on and took the 10 year fixed that was offered.
I think doing this might've prevented otherwise serious financial hardship had I left it on standard variable (or even took a shorter deal at a lower rate).
So her brief premiership was not entirely in vain. Smart of you.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
Don't worry it will go as soon as my generation reaches retirement, I am sure.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
The liberal elite won the culture war, we have homosexual marriage, abortion near on demand up to 24 weeks, Pride days even in corporations, religious teachers sacked for teaching traditional views of gender and sexuality, migration to the UK higher than ever before even despite Brexit, statues being pulled down in big cities and museums. Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate the ranks of academia, the civil service, lawyers, big corporations and TV news from the BBC to Channel 4.
Even the economic argument the right was alleged to have won is looking shaky with the tax burden high and likely to get even higher under a Starmer government, increasing public spending and things which were privatised like railways now being drawn up by stealth under public ownership. While the Unions are shaking their fists again and striking for huge wage rises.
The elite is also different, the rich list in the Sunday Times is now mainly self made entrepreneurs, whereas in the early 1980s it was mainly landowners and inherited wealth. Public schools are now seeing pupils being rejected from Oxbridge more than ever, with 65% of Oxford and 70% of Cambridge students from state schools and even most Tory MPs now state educated.
"Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate..." - views. Opinions. Political positions. Not ability to enact wide or systemic change. Just "people who are in the modern middle class hold different opinions to people in the old middle class and old upper class". That's what this is all about.
Same sex marriage is conservative - yes it was important for same sex couples to have the same rights as any married couples, to visit the ill, to inherit, to live together - but it essentially assimilation into the heteronormative tradition. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" used to be about difference, not assimilation. Abortion is still illegal without 2 doctors signing off on it in this country. And again, dog whistle with "religious teachers" because you don't want a Muslim to teach students fundamental Islamism - you want a specific brand of traditional Christianity imposed on kids.
Starmer is going out with his shadow chancellor on TV every day saying that he won't do anything radical on the economy because of the "economic condition". A majority of TORY voters want public ownership of necessary utilities, and the Labour party is STILL ruling it out.
You call lefties permanent victims, and then complain that the poors are being allowed into the posh people unis, and that new money are lauded like some kind of Victorian Whig. We live in the world created by Thatcherism and Reaganism, by the neoliberal consensus, by capital and capitalism. You won; get over it.
Same sex marriage is ultimately what gay men and lesbians wanted. Aren't you, here, complaining about having won the argument?
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
@steverichards14 I recall EU diplomats telling me post 2016 that UK was least suited to leave partly because of N.Ireland.. but also its dependence on single market in which its economy had flourished.They spoke out of bewilderment..the argument already lost.And here we are..
"flourished" as in we had 6 0f the 10poorest regions in Western Europe, Which wasnt the case when we went in,
Where were the poorest regions in Western Europe when we went in?
Start with Ireland
Is that you saying you don't know exactly? Because I don't even know where to look for these data.
well being old enough to recall when we went in reland was miles behind the UK and the whole of the Mezzogiorno wasnt exactly rolling in cash. Thats where youll find the poorest regions in 1973.
So you don't know. Your economic data is... you went for a drive fifty years ago.
50 years ago I was 12 so I didn't drive anywhere,
I'm about the same age, and did indeed go for a drive in Ireland around fifty years ago (in the passenger seat) on holiday. FWIW.
The European Regional Development Fund was set up largely at the behest of Italy and the UK (us because we were large budget contributors under CAP, and it gave us a way to get money back). So although I don't have any figures either, it seems that we had a number of regions which were beneficiaries, and that Italy was a major beneficiary too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Regional_Development_Fund#History
Other than Ireland, everyone else was pretty well off in comparison.
Ireland and Italy had the poorest regions . The UKs poorest region was NI and still is.
IThers not much to suggest we have "flourished" in the EU,. The only areas which could make tha claim are London and the South East, the rest of the country has had slow decline .
I chiefly remember the bombs on the night we stopped in Belfast, and our childish disappointment at not being allowed to go see the aftermath.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Social democracy won (even if social democratic parties are vanishing). Most rich world economies have public spending at 40-50% of GDP and extensive welfare states.
If we joined the Euro we'd be in the ECB. The addition of Kyiv in a few years will keep it generally poor enough to maintain a generally weaker Euro compared to a western Europe only deal and we'd have lower interest rates courtesy of the ECB.
What's not to like
Interest rates for savers.
They've got all the world's stock markets to invest in.
Pulpy, it's absolutely bog standard advice not to put all your savings in the stock market.
(a) people with not very much anyway - their emergency fund has lost 10%++ of its value, even if they don't draw on it (b) people who don't have the risk appetite and/or knowledge you do (c) people who are coming up to old age and need to move out of equities (old rule of thumb, deduct your age from 100 and don't have more than that percentage in equities)
Got 3.85 already with RCI who actually upped their rates without needing to be asked, too (and might yet again for all I know).
Still, that's only half inflation. But it's a damn sight better than some of the other banks. And if you are old or not able to use the net and can't get to a branch of a bank which does offer a decent rate, you are even more screwed.
Coventry BS is offering 4% with 4 withdrawals / year. They’ll probably put that up a touch after today.
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
I agree and it needs to be stopped and I am a pensioner and benefit from it
No blame attaches Big G: at the time it was introduced it was righting a historic wrong & was good politics to boot. The problem is the way it has been structured makes it very hard for a politician to reverse even partially. Blair should have set either a time or income ratio limit when bringing it in, to open up the political space for the question of exactly what portion of national income it is reasonable to extend as a benefit to all retirees. As it is we seem to be locked into an ever greater transfer of wealth with no political way out. Eventually something will give, but I fear it will be some kind of populist movement (from either the far right or the far left) if mainstream politics refuses to engage with the question.
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
Don't worry it will go as soon as my generation reaches retirement, I am sure.
Yes, and when my generation dies off.
It immoral, it is mad, but what do we do about it?
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
Interest rates ought to have been raised very gradually, years ago (although the pandemic would have forced them back down again).
Looking at the numbers for producer prices (where prices are actually falling) this should feed through into consumer prices in coming months.
So the Tories still lead Labour by 2% in rural areas with Yougov then even despite trailing Labour by 16% overall in the latest Yougov UK wide poll.
Labour may be closer there but they won't win rural areas just as they failed to in 1997 and 2001 despite big wins nationally and just as the Conservatives failed to win inner city areas overall even in 1983, 1987 or 2019, their biggest wins in the last 50 years. The chart showing the Tories winning urban areas in 2019 I suspect includes the suburbs not just inner cities
If Labour win Rural seats the Tory party will be below 100 seats at the next election.
Hear there were some serious truth bombs at the 1922 Committee in address by @FrankLuntz to Tory MPs.
Said anyone with a 15k or less majority is "at this moment in time" under threat of losing their seat - added: "this is what CCHQ are not telling you."
Not sure why CCHQ need to tell them - they must know from their constituents
It is very easy to miss what you do not want to hear.
Ideally for the party CCHQ would drop truth bombs, but also have a plan to inspire recovery.
So far the only plan appears to be 'out Nimby the LDs'.
She appears to believe that the energy company windfall tax will solve inflation by both reducing energy bills and paying for public sector pay rises which won't be inflationary
BP and Shell are amongst the worse performers in the FTSE 100 this year. Where are these super profits she is going to tax? Already spent.
That general election list of options in full:
CON - absolutely useless, no idea what they are doing, complete meltdown
LAB - no credible policies, windfall tax cannot cover everything
LD - want the state to pay people's mortgages, enough said
👿👿👿
Think yourself lucky. In Scotland we have the additional choice of the SNP!!
@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
Rishi needs to start piling the failures of Brexit firmly at Boris's door. Emphasize that it was nice idea comprehensively cocked up by Boris, his incompetence and his egotism. The Boris myth must be destroyed for all the Tories' sake, and Brexit is the perfect place to start.
Who would he be kidding apart from himself ? The conservatives are failing because they dont have conservative policies and the voters can see that.
What 'are' conservative policies?
The public wants good public services. It wants society to work. It wants housing and jobs. The tories aren't delviering and no on thinks that doing things like cutting tax for the richest is going to deliver those things.
And yet as their position becomes ever more desperate don't be surprised if they go for that - they are unhappy with the present direction and appear to be in 'if we don't do x why even bother?' mode.
President Zelenskyy warns that Russia is considering carrying out a terrorist attack at Ukraine's Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant involving a release of radiation.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
Interest rates ought to have been raised very gradually, years ago (although the pandemic would have forced them back down again).
Looking at the numbers for producer prices (where prices are actually falling) this should feed through into consumer prices in coming months.
We are indeed paying the price for the decade of low IR and investment post 2008.
I do beleive that this is in part the fall out from that. It set us on a path during the 2010s which just pilled all the bad stuff into the future.
And of course things since that time, Brexit, Ukraine, Pandemic etc.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I would just comment that a similar mortgage crisis happened in the 1990s and many repossession occurred, negative equity was the norm, and house prices took 5 years to recover
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
Rishi needs to start piling the failures of Brexit firmly at Boris's door. Emphasize that it was nice idea comprehensively cocked up by Boris, his incompetence and his egotism. The Boris myth must be destroyed for all the Tories' sake, and Brexit is the perfect place to start.
Who would he be kidding apart from himself ? The conservatives are failing because they dont have conservative policies and the voters can see that.
What 'are' conservative policies?
The public wants good public services. It wants society to work. It wants housing and jobs. The tories aren't delviering and no on thinks that doing things like cutting tax for the richest is going to deliver those things.
The public wants low taxes and first-class public services. They also think people earning slightly more than themselves should pay more tax.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
I'm not complaining about it, I'm just saying it was never the be all and end all, and yet it is treated as such. We still get called groomers if we think it's a good idea for children to learn we exist, let alone could be some of their classmates parents; and that's still just another assimilationist problem. The original criticisms of the nuclear family (a modern invention, not a traditional one at all), the criticisms of comphet, the criticisms of exploitation of women's labour not being valued - all parts of the queer struggle and the original queer rights movement.
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
The current teenage scribbler for the Times, James Marriott...
James Marriott seems to have built up an impressive set of articles (so how the Times got him is beyond me). He's already read and reviewed Peter Turchin's "End Times" - I've been looking thru his lectures on YouTube and trying to make sense (Turchin has bad delivery and a pronounced Italian accent, which doesn't help).
I've had a look at some of Marriott's articles: here is a tasting
Bank has said more tightening is needed with near 6% predicted
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
The triple lock is going to become a millstone round this country’s neck as time progresses. Almost impossible to kill politically, but progressively starving the working population of the share of their own output that would enable them to afford to life in modern Britain.
Serves them right for not being born to the right generation. And for buying takeout coffee occasionally and an ipad for Christmas, the lavish devils. I even hear they go on holiday sometimes.
The current teenage scribbler for the Times, James Marriott is a little perturbed by what he calls "Centrist Populism"- i.e. the gathering wrath of moderates towards Brexit and all other works of Torydom.
I think I can explain the gathering disaster for the Conservatives in very simple terms.
The educated middle class have had more than a decade of being told that experts don´t matter (they are trying to do it again today, seeking to transfer the blame for the UK´s economic woes towards the Bank of England, rather than their own policy incompetence).
There has been decades of utter bullshit, absurd power stance policies which do not even begin to scratch the surface of under investment and misallocation of capital across the whole economy for decades.
Then there is the more than 40 years of the playground shit show of internal Tory party politics, which culminated in the travesty of "Prime Minister" Boris Johnson, but covered so much else in childish personality clashes The mass expulsion of adults, from the Conservatives by Johnson was the last chance for the Tories.
The patient people of Britain are waiting for the fat lady to sing, and she is clearing her throat.
The Tories are going to face a whole new world of pain at the next election, but more to the point I think we are going to see a long overdue period of radical change. The country in 10 years will have changed in ways- economic, political, social and constitutional- that I do not see the Tories being able to survive.
This is not just about the 2024/5 election, it will be epochal.
Good.
In 5 years we could have a high tax, even higher inflation and higher interest rates deeply unpopular Labour government plagued with even more frequent strikes and with a big deficit and rising unemployment. The idea Labour will win the next general election and be in power for all time is complacency of the first degree from you and other left liberals
I believe that Cicero is a former Tory voter ?
Complacency is the belief that the Tory party is now anything more than a parody of what once could claim to be the natural party of government.
It is complacency for any party to say they are 'the natural party of government' in a democracy, the Tories have suffered heavy defeats before in 1997, 2001. 1966, 1945, 1906, 1880 and against Palmerston on many occasions and always come back.
Not this time.
Even if Labour screw it up, which they probably will, the Conservatives deserve evisceration. The continuing criminal investigations and yet further revelations of abject unfitness for office will keep reminding people that the crisis was Torydom´s last act.
Against all expert views, you got your ridiculous Brexit, now I hope its your political epitaph.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
Not entirely true to say they couldn't have ever envisaged a possible rapid rise in interest rates. But otherwise, I entirely agree with you - why pillory someone for making a decision which turns out to be bad (unless that someone happens to be a politician making a decision on your behalf, of course...) ?
President Zelenskyy warns that Russia is considering carrying out a terrorist attack at Ukraine's Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant involving a release of radiation.
Preposterous - as the tankies and stop the westers like to tell us, Russia must ne appeased because they might well nuke us all to oblivion if we don't, but they'd never blow up dams or powerplants.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
The liberal elite won the culture war, we have homosexual marriage, abortion near on demand up to 24 weeks, Pride days even in corporations, religious teachers sacked for teaching traditional views of gender and sexuality, migration to the UK higher than ever before even despite Brexit, statues being pulled down in big cities and museums. Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate the ranks of academia, the civil service, lawyers, big corporations and TV news from the BBC to Channel 4.
Even the economic argument the right was alleged to have won is looking shaky with the tax burden high and likely to get even higher under a Starmer government, increasing public spending and things which were privatised like railways now being drawn up by stealth under public ownership. While the Unions are shaking their fists again and striking for huge wage rises.
The elite is also different, the rich list in the Sunday Times is now mainly self made entrepreneurs, whereas in the early 1980s it was mainly landowners and inherited wealth. Public schools are now seeing pupils being rejected from Oxbridge more than ever, with 65% of Oxford and 70% of Cambridge students from state schools and even most Tory MPs now state educated.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I would just comment that a similar mortgage crisis happened in the 1990s and many repossession occurred, negative equity was the norm, and house prices took 5 years to recover
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
The interest rates were 5% in 2008. How do we forget things so quickly?
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
I'm not complaining about it, I'm just saying it was never the be all and end all, and yet it is treated as such. We still get called groomers if we think it's a good idea for children to learn we exist, let alone could be some of their classmates parents; and that's still just another assimilationist problem. The original criticisms of the nuclear family (a modern invention, not a traditional one at all), the criticisms of comphet, the criticisms of exploitation of women's labour not being valued - all parts of the queer struggle and the original queer rights movement.
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
What you have to come to terms with is that most gays and lesbians are not radical socialists, who are out to destroy capitalism.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Social democracy won (even if social democratic parties are vanishing). Most rich world economies have public spending at 40-50% of GDP and extensive welfare states.
Thatcher called Blair her heir. The welfare state has been cut year on year since 2008. Public spending is high due to bungs to private corporations and military spending - and public coffers are empty because of tax cuts after tax cuts. If social democracy is an incrementalistic approach to socialist equality via the ballot box, why is wealth inequality higher now than 50 years ago? You're looking at technological gains and saying that the quality of life is better for most people, therefore society must have improved, but the gap between the richest and poorest is astronomically greater than previously.
I'm in the middle of selling my late mother's house and desperately hoping that the buyers don't pull out in the face of rising mortgage rates.
Hopefully more people think as you are and that desperation leads to them slashing prices back down to an appropriate level at about 3-4x income multiples rather than the disgustingly absurd 8x multiples that have come about. So about 50% of what they were quoting last year ideally would be perfect.
Unfortunately supply and demand is likely to step in the way of that, because we have a massive shortage still, but your anecdote is really positive news. Hopefully your sale does go through to someone, at a cheap and reasonable amount. 👍
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
I think he's referring to senior civil servants, judges and heads of quangos and coporates. Who never seem to get sacked, aren't accountable, yet wield the power to contradict elected politicians and even topple them. Suella Braverman isn't a member of the elite - she can't even get a plane to Rwanda.
Yes, try and find a socially conservative, pro Brexit senior civil servant, judge or head of a quango or even FTSE 100 company
That’s because senior civil servants, judges, heads of quangos and FTSE 100 companies tend to be intelligent people. Intelligent people didn’t vote for Brexit.
I hardly know how to engage with such a thoroughly dull-witted utterance.
Interesting comments by Sir CW at the covid inquiry, fide Graun feed:
Whitty says 'extremely concerning' threats to expert advisers during Covid could undermine future disaster planning Back at the Covid inquiry, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, says Britain has a strong network in place providing scientific advice to government for emergencies.
But he says there are two potential threats to this.
First, he says, universities are becoming more “hawkish”, which means they may be less willing to spare academics for this sort of work.
Second, he says, the amount of abuse, and in some cases threats, levelled at experts during Covid was “extremely concerning”, he says. He says society should be firm in saying how much it appreciates the work of these experts. Usually they are acting unpaid, he says.
The current teenage scribbler for the Times, James Marriott...
James Marriott seems to have built up an impressive set of articles (so how the Times got him is beyond me). He's already read and reviewed Peter Turchin's "End Times" - I've been looking thru his lectures on YouTube and trying to make sense (Turchin has bad delivery and a pronounced Italian accent, which doesn't help).
I've had a look at some of Marriott's articles: here is a tasting
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I hope very few people lose their homes ideally, even if prices collapse and people go into negative equity so long as you can keep up with repayments you'll keep your home. And hopefully banks are sensible and decide that adjusting repayment schedules for those who've borrowed to be more forbearing is better than foreclosing on homes that will then be worth a fraction of what they're owed potentially.
The people who stand to lose out are those who expect unearnt property windfalls in the hundreds of thousands may suddenly find they have to earn their own money instead. In which case 🎻
The current teenage scribbler for the Times, James Marriott is a little perturbed by what he calls "Centrist Populism"- i.e. the gathering wrath of moderates towards Brexit and all other works of Torydom.
I think I can explain the gathering disaster for the Conservatives in very simple terms.
The educated middle class have had more than a decade of being told that experts don´t matter (they are trying to do it again today, seeking to transfer the blame for the UK´s economic woes towards the Bank of England, rather than their own policy incompetence).
There has been decades of utter bullshit, absurd power stance policies which do not even begin to scratch the surface of under investment and misallocation of capital across the whole economy for decades.
Then there is the more than 40 years of the playground shit show of internal Tory party politics, which culminated in the travesty of "Prime Minister" Boris Johnson, but covered so much else in childish personality clashes The mass expulsion of adults, from the Conservatives by Johnson was the last chance for the Tories.
The patient people of Britain are waiting for the fat lady to sing, and she is clearing her throat.
The Tories are going to face a whole new world of pain at the next election, but more to the point I think we are going to see a long overdue period of radical change. The country in 10 years will have changed in ways- economic, political, social and constitutional- that I do not see the Tories being able to survive.
This is not just about the 2024/5 election, it will be epochal.
Good.
In 5 years we could have a high tax, even higher inflation and higher interest rates deeply unpopular Labour government plagued with even more frequent strikes and with a big deficit and rising unemployment. The idea Labour will win the next general election and be in power for all time is complacency of the first degree from you and other left liberals
I believe that Cicero is a former Tory voter ?
Complacency is the belief that the Tory party is now anything more than a parody of what once could claim to be the natural party of government.
It is complacency for any party to say they are 'the natural party of government' in a democracy, the Tories have suffered heavy defeats before in 1997, 2001. 1966, 1945, 1906, 1880 and against Palmerston on many occasions and always come back.
Not this time.
Even if Labour screw it up, which they probably will, the Conservatives deserve evisceration. The continuing criminal investigations and yet further revelations of abject unfitness for office will keep reminding people that the crisis was Torydom´s last act.
Against all expert views, you got your ridiculous Brexit, now I hope its your political epitaph.
The Conservatives may deserve evisceration, but in every democracy there is a main left of centre party, and a main right of centre party, and that division endures, regardless of the parties' records. Grievances are directed at governments, not oppositions.
I do feel your fury at Brexit is fundamentally about injured pride.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
I'm not complaining about it, I'm just saying it was never the be all and end all, and yet it is treated as such. We still get called groomers if we think it's a good idea for children to learn we exist, let alone could be some of their classmates parents; and that's still just another assimilationist problem. The original criticisms of the nuclear family (a modern invention, not a traditional one at all), the criticisms of comphet, the criticisms of exploitation of women's labour not being valued - all parts of the queer struggle and the original queer rights movement.
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
What you have to come to terms with is that most gays and lesbians are not radical socialists, who are out to destroy capitalism.
Some of them even .... right wing!
What had 99% of the post to which you replied have to do with either radical socialism or the destruction of capitalism ?
@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
Rishi needs to start piling the failures of Brexit firmly at Boris's door. Emphasize that it was nice idea comprehensively cocked up by Boris, his incompetence and his egotism. The Boris myth must be destroyed for all the Tories' sake, and Brexit is the perfect place to start.
Who would he be kidding apart from himself ? The conservatives are failing because they dont have conservative policies and the voters can see that.
What 'are' conservative policies?
The public wants good public services. It wants society to work. It wants housing and jobs. The tories aren't delviering and no on thinks that doing things like cutting tax for the richest is going to deliver those things.
The public wants low taxes and first-class public services. They also think people earning slightly more than themselves should pay more tax.
All of which are actually very realistic expectations.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
But the whole point of reforming mortgage approvals was that even if people "could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year" the approval process is meant to protect them from getting into such a mess. It's blindingly obvious now that far too many people have got mortgages that they could only service providing rates stayed close to the all-time low, literally the lowest for 300 odd years.
It's like nobody has learnt a bloody thing from previous busts. It was all too predictable that if rates returned to something like the norm, which frankly should have been pencilled in for years ago, a lot of people were going to end up in trouble again.
I'll say it again, some days I wonder how civilization manages to continue, nobody seems to have a clue what they are doing but we keep on ticking.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
I think he's referring to senior civil servants, judges and heads of quangos and coporates. Who never seem to get sacked, aren't accountable, yet wield the power to contradict elected politicians and even topple them. Suella Braverman isn't a member of the elite - she can't even get a plane to Rwanda.
Yes, try and find a socially conservative, pro Brexit senior civil servant, judge or head of a quango or even FTSE 100 company
That’s because senior civil servants, judges, heads of quangos and FTSE 100 companies tend to be intelligent people. Intelligent people didn’t vote for Brexit.
I hardly know how to engage with such a thoroughly dull-witted utterance.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
I'm not complaining about it, I'm just saying it was never the be all and end all, and yet it is treated as such. We still get called groomers if we think it's a good idea for children to learn we exist, let alone could be some of their classmates parents; and that's still just another assimilationist problem. The original criticisms of the nuclear family (a modern invention, not a traditional one at all), the criticisms of comphet, the criticisms of exploitation of women's labour not being valued - all parts of the queer struggle and the original queer rights movement.
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
What you have to come to terms with is that most gays and lesbians are not radical socialists, who are out to destroy capitalism.
Some of them even .... right wing!
What part of my last paragraph is "radical socialism"? Did I say "there is no pleasing me until radical socialism has won"? I am not a "radical socialist", I probably fall more on the anarcho-communist line of things with Makhno, Kropotkin and Rojava, but I would be pleased with not being threatened by increasing violence from street thugs and the legislating of my friends and family who are just trying to use the bathroom and live their lives.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
Many people who comment about this issue have benefitted from luck and possibly generational wealth transfers of some sort or another, but then start believing that the cause of their success is something else: ie brilliant judgement or hard work.
There needs to be a solution to the high interest rate problem because it means that one group (mortgage holders) are taking on the personal cost of controlling inflation to the benefit of another, ie those with savings. It isn't tenable.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I would just comment that a similar mortgage crisis happened in the 1990s and many repossession occurred, negative equity was the norm, and house prices took 5 years to recover
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
The BoE's primary target is 2% inflation. Given we nearly had deflation for a while, and have generally been below 2% for years, what options did they have?
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I would just comment that a similar mortgage crisis happened in the 1990s and many repossession occurred, negative equity was the norm, and house prices took 5 years to recover
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
Why should homeowners never face a bleak time? In order to keep balance you need a share of summer and winter, you need some bleak times and some positive times.
We've had two decades of overheating property value growth. A bleak time isn't just overdue, its ridiculously long overdue.
And all the overheating that many home owners have loved - and encouraged by NIMBY policies - has led to a very bleak time for those who want to save a deposit to have their own time.
Consider this 'bleak' time some very much needed rainfall after a very long and for many very difficult drought.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Social democracy won (even if social democratic parties are vanishing). Most rich world economies have public spending at 40-50% of GDP and extensive welfare states.
Thatcher called Blair her heir. The welfare state has been cut year on year since 2008. Public spending is high due to bungs to private corporations and military spending - and public coffers are empty because of tax cuts after tax cuts. If social democracy is an incrementalistic approach to socialist equality via the ballot box, why is wealth inequality higher now than 50 years ago? You're looking at technological gains and saying that the quality of life is better for most people, therefore society must have improved, but the gap between the richest and poorest is astronomically greater than previously.
Military spending is about 2-2.5% of GDP. That is dwarfed by the amounts spent on pensions and the NHS. An ageing population means that the welfare state seems meaner, even as expenditure grows.
Social democracy has never been about eliminating the wealthy, Simply about redistribution from the wealthy. Ours is a very redistributive system.
@gavinesler It appears the Sunak government is unwilling to defend the indefensible. If they cannot even defend their acceptance of Brexit, is there any point to the Sunak government? Thoughts?
Rishi needs to start piling the failures of Brexit firmly at Boris's door. Emphasize that it was nice idea comprehensively cocked up by Boris, his incompetence and his egotism. The Boris myth must be destroyed for all the Tories' sake, and Brexit is the perfect place to start.
Who would he be kidding apart from himself ? The conservatives are failing because they dont have conservative policies and the voters can see that.
What 'are' conservative policies?
The public wants good public services. It wants society to work. It wants housing and jobs. The tories aren't delviering and no on thinks that doing things like cutting tax for the richest is going to deliver those things.
The public wants low taxes and first-class public services. They also think people earning slightly more than themselves should pay more tax.
True. But at the moment we have the Tories vs Labour.. which one do and will they have more faith in?
The current way isn't working, everyone knows it, and the tories are worried about IHT which affects a tiny level of people (mostly themselves).
Lets actually do things. scrap planning regulations so things can be built, but update the requirements so they have enough size and are green. Put tax breaks into new developements which fund lower cost higher density buildings (so we have more flats). Lets get infrastructure done.
Build build build and it'll solve so many issues. From housing to jobs and many more.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
But the whole point of reforming mortgage approvals was that even if people "could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year" the approval process is meant to protect them from getting into such a mess. It's blindingly obvious now that far too many people have got mortgages that they could only service providing rates stayed close to the all-time low, literally the lowest for 300 odd years.
That would have been fine if wages had increased and so relieved pressure on households. But they haven't.
You got it. Except the first will say the navy DID torpedo migrants and that they're going to do more of the same, and that the whining liberal Labour elite want to stop them, tying their hands, so that hardworking Brits can all have "migrants" for neighbours.
Those who think the government's unpopularity mid-term means it's on course for losing the next election are naive. Bookies love them.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
If you're actually complaining about achieving same sex marriage, there really is no pleasing you.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
I'm not complaining about it, I'm just saying it was never the be all and end all, and yet it is treated as such. We still get called groomers if we think it's a good idea for children to learn we exist, let alone could be some of their classmates parents; and that's still just another assimilationist problem. The original criticisms of the nuclear family (a modern invention, not a traditional one at all), the criticisms of comphet, the criticisms of exploitation of women's labour not being valued - all parts of the queer struggle and the original queer rights movement.
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
What you have to come to terms with is that most gays and lesbians are not radical socialists, who are out to destroy capitalism.
Some of them even .... right wing!
What had 99% of the post to which you replied have to do with either radical socialism or the destruction of capitalism ?
I had taken the references to "Queer Struggle", hostility to the nuclear family, hostility to "heteronormativity" and criticism of corporations to mean that the poster was seeking a radical transformation of society in a very left wing direction.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Social democracy won (even if social democratic parties are vanishing). Most rich world economies have public spending at 40-50% of GDP and extensive welfare states.
Thatcher called Blair her heir. The welfare state has been cut year on year since 2008. Public spending is high due to bungs to private corporations and military spending - and public coffers are empty because of tax cuts after tax cuts. If social democracy is an incrementalistic approach to socialist equality via the ballot box, why is wealth inequality higher now than 50 years ago? You're looking at technological gains and saying that the quality of life is better for most people, therefore society must have improved, but the gap between the richest and poorest is astronomically greater than previously.
Military spending is about 2-2.5% of GDP. That is dwarfed by the amounts spent on pensions and the NHS. An ageing population means that the welfare state seems meaner, even as expenditure grows.
Social democracy has never been about eliminating the wealthy, Simply about redistribution from the wealthy. Ours is a very redistributive system.
Social democracy means the wealthy give up some of their money rather than giving up all of it and having their family murdered by angry peasants. The smarter ones among them have always realised that.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
The above concept of the "elite" is cribbed from Rob Henderson's theory of "luxury beliefs".
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
What is a luxury belief? I've heard people call "gender ideology" a "luxury belief" - despite the fact the vast majority of trans people are working class and poor, disproportionately homeless and suffer from mental health issues related to being ostracised by society; doesn't sound very "luxury" to me. Whereas I would say "trickle down economics" is a pretty "luxury belief" - only the rich can believe it, it justifies their existence and their hoarding of wealth, and it patently doesn't work. Is "equal rights" a luxury belief? "Human rights"? "Society"?
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
Social democracy won (even if social democratic parties are vanishing). Most rich world economies have public spending at 40-50% of GDP and extensive welfare states.
Thatcher called Blair her heir. The welfare state has been cut year on year since 2008. Public spending is high due to bungs to private corporations and military spending - and public coffers are empty because of tax cuts after tax cuts. If social democracy is an incrementalistic approach to socialist equality via the ballot box, why is wealth inequality higher now than 50 years ago? You're looking at technological gains and saying that the quality of life is better for most people, therefore society must have improved, but the gap between the richest and poorest is astronomically greater than previously.
Military spending is about 2-2.5% of GDP. That is dwarfed by the amounts spent on pensions and the NHS. An ageing population means that the welfare state seems meaner, even as expenditure grows.
Social democracy has never been about eliminating the wealthy, Simply about redistribution from the wealthy. Ours is a very redistributive system.
Social democracy means the wealthy give up some of their money rather than giving up all of it and having their family murdered by angry peasants. The smarter ones among them have always realised that.
That's so. If you want a no-tax society, well, Somalia is the place for you.
Let's hear it for Theresa May, who courageously voted in favour of the privileges committee's report. No, wait...remind me which prime minister it was who gave Boris Johnson his first job in central government, as foreign secretary no less, despite his known record of winging it in all the other jobs he'd ever had, and even worse, of repeatedly being sacked for telling lies. But she's critical now, right.
You got it. Except the first will say the navy DID torpedo migrants and that they're going to do more of the same, and the whining liberal Labour elite want to stop them so that hardworking Brits can all have "migrants" for neighbours.
Even if inflation falls Sunak can hardly bring out the bunting given to get there it would have driven many people to lose their homes .
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
I would just comment that a similar mortgage crisis happened in the 1990s and many repossession occurred, negative equity was the norm, and house prices took 5 years to recover
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
Why should homeowners never face a bleak time? In order to keep balance you need a share of summer and winter, you need some bleak times and some positive times.
We've had two decades of overheating property value growth. A bleak time isn't just overdue, its ridiculously long overdue.
And all the overheating that many home owners have loved - and encouraged by NIMBY policies - has led to a very bleak time for those who want to save a deposit to have their own time.
Consider this 'bleak' time some very much needed rainfall after a very long and for many very difficult drought.
Maybe, but there is a human side to this and in the 1990s I witnessed many evictions with the bailiffs and police in attendance and you only need to watch one young family being evicted with the obvious trauma, not to be seriously upset unless you have no heart
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
The whole misuse of the concept of "elites" by people like HYUFD strikes me as so much playing with fire. To hear populist narratives coming out of the mouths of "conservatives" is disturbing.
The danger is that normalising such language opens the door of the town hall to far worse people than either the stupid conservatives speaking like this or the stupid people they are trying to attack.
Populism isn't a plaything. It's a vicious weapon that should only be unleashed when it's really, really needed. If your target is tweedy academics and pride flags, you can be damn sure it's not needed.
Yes, reading the Spectator these days is like reading a student Trotskyist pamphlet: full of talk of 'our rulers', 'the ruling class', 'the ruling elite' etc. My theory is that a certain type of middle-class conservative bitterly regrets letting the 1970s and punk rock pass them by and is desperate for another go.
Goodwin just dislikes the evolution of societal norms. Most of Goodwin's recent book (which has very few actual citations for an academic) claims that the new "elite" are essentially just all university graduates, women, and ethnic or sexual minorities, and the old elite are white working class people and the elderly. Which is clearly not the case, that's just generational divide.
The "elite" are the same people who have owned and controlled land since their ancestors landed on these shores in 1066. The "elite" are the same narrow group of people who go to one of two or three public schools and one of two universities. The "elite" are the people who have the opportunity to leverage their preexisting wealth and networks into cushy jobs where they can publish in national newspapers on a regular basis or get a peerage before the age of 30.
What the new generation have is the ability for the old elites to hear them, because social media allows the plebs to shout at anyone. They also have more willingness to "talk back" to their "betters". Graduates may have more pluralistic attitudes because they interact with a different set of people whilst at university - people from across the country and across the world.
I want to know what significant impact the "new elite" have had. If we're talking about the press - that's overwhelming right wing in this country. The government has been right wing / centrist since Thatcher. Yes, we have progressed on open racism, sexism and homophobia - but barely and only if it is really obvious (in his book Goodwin complains that the "new elite" think doing accents and complaining that people don't speak English in the UK are racist is bad, actually, and thinks that we should define the number of people who hold racially prejudicial views on the basis of a poll that asked people if they self defined as racist).
The problem with Goodwin, HYUFD, and a lot of British conservatism is they're complaining about winning too much. They won the economic argument - everyone's a Thatcherite now. They won on the EU - we're leaving. They won most of the culture war - gay rights begins and ends with the right to act like straight people with same sex marriage, and it's more important that 5 rich people are likely dead out of their own hubris than it is 500 migrants were killed when their boat was sank. But winning doesn't make your enemies shut up and respect you, and that's what they want - for the goddamn poors and women and gays and ethnics to just accept their place in the world and stop asking for a better world. They believe it was shit for them (despite most of them living through the golden age of the welfare state and investment into their progress) and therefore demand that it must be shit for the rest of us. "Didn't do me any harm..." etc etc, bullcrap bullcrap
The liberal elite won the culture war, we have homosexual marriage, abortion near on demand up to 24 weeks, Pride days even in corporations, religious teachers sacked for teaching traditional views of gender and sexuality, migration to the UK higher than ever before even despite Brexit, statues being pulled down in big cities and museums. Social liberalism and anti Brexit views dominate the ranks of academia, the civil service, lawyers, big corporations and TV news from the BBC to Channel 4.
Even the economic argument the right was alleged to have won is looking shaky with the tax burden high and likely to get even higher under a Starmer government, increasing public spending and things which were privatised like railways now being drawn up by stealth under public ownership. While the Unions are shaking their fists again and striking for huge wage rises.
The elite is also different, the rich list in the Sunday Times is now mainly self made entrepreneurs, whereas in the early 1980s it was mainly landowners and inherited wealth. Public schools are now seeing pupils being rejected from Oxbridge more than ever, with 65% of Oxford and 70% of Cambridge students from state schools and even most Tory MPs now state educated.
Social liberalism won the culture war. That doesn’t mean the “liberal elite” won it. Rather, the public at large threw off the social conservatism of the then elite.
High migration isn’t proof of a ruling liberal elite: high migration is the result of Conservative Party policies.
And saying 65% of Oxford’s intake is from state schools is an odd way of saying the privately educated are still massively over-represented at Oxford.
I'm in the middle of selling my late mother's house and desperately hoping that the buyers don't pull out in the face of rising mortgage rates.
We're in the market for a new house. We'll be cash buyers, and looking to move to the coast. It makes me feel dirty, knowing that over the next few months, I'll probably be picking over the bones of marriages and families that haven't made it through the ever expanding crisis, trying to snaffle a house for a rock bottom price. I know how it feels, having gone through a divorce and negative equity sale back in 89 or 90. I remember vividly that one month when interest rates were barmy for a short while, my mortgage payment was a couple of quid under my take home pay. Genuinely took me years to get back on my feet. Grim times ahead for many of our citizens.
'@GoodwinMJ · 17h The old elite projected their social status through their wealth, estates & titles. The new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by preaching radical woke progressivism'
Goodwin is really disappearing ever deeper up his own backside.
Yes. It is quite evident that the new elite project their status & distinguish themselves from the masses by uttering mantras which *appear* to be progressive.
The reality is nothing changes, but they all give each other awards for being on message - see the revelation about how much money the Met Police spends on awarding itself awards.
Goodwin just isn't thinking structurally about who the 'elite' are. Being an academic, he probably thinks that leftie academics with pride flags in their twitter profile are a part of the elite - ie it's pure narcissism. The elite are people who control the levers of political and economic power, ie people in business and finance and the Tory party. These are not people you will bump into at a BLM protest, believe me.
I think he's referring to senior civil servants, judges and heads of quangos and coporates. Who never seem to get sacked, aren't accountable, yet wield the power to contradict elected politicians and even topple them. Suella Braverman isn't a member of the elite - she can't even get a plane to Rwanda.
Yes, try and find a socially conservative, pro Brexit senior civil servant, judge or head of a quango or even FTSE 100 company
That’s because senior civil servants, judges, heads of quangos and FTSE 100 companies tend to be intelligent people. Intelligent people didn’t vote for Brexit.
I hardly know how to engage with such a thoroughly dull-witted utterance.
I'm also thinking about moving house and getting a new place with my girlfriend. She has a place to sell to. I think we'll be playing the long game with it, which is frustating, but at least we both have houses we are afford over our heads.
Comments
(a) people with not very much anyway - their emergency fund has lost 10%++ of its value, even if they don't draw on it
(b) people who don't have the risk appetite and/or knowledge you do
(c) people who are coming up to old age and need to move out of equities (old rule of thumb, deduct your age from 100 and don't have more than that percentage in equities)
I'd hate to see what them in a panicky tailspin looks like.
Seems wage growth over 7% plus the 10.1% triple lock and benefits increases with rises in the national living wage have been the main drivers
As JO'B says 'Compassion for the conned, contempt for the conmen'. I don't want to watch the conned flailing around like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket tonight. They gleefully voted for their own impoverishment and exploitation. I can't watch.
If you actually want a radical socialist utopia, from which marriage has disappeared, well, too bad. Most people don't want it.
centristWaterstones Dads". Insulting your core readership is an... interesting strategy?Obviously doesn’t help if they’re on a tracker rather than fix but I think in the current situation fixing for at least a year or two probably adviseable - rates aren’t going to crash down overnight.
https://www.raisin.co.uk/term-deposit/gb-bank-easy-access/?#bank-product-details
Might open with them
The European Regional Development Fund was set up largely at the behest of Italy and the UK (us because we were large budget contributors under CAP, and it gave us a way to get money back). So although I don't have any figures either, it seems that we had a number of regions which were beneficiaries, and that Italy was a major beneficiary too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Regional_Development_Fund#History
Other than Ireland, everyone else was pretty well off in comparison.
Wuhan clan: we finally know the identity of the scientists in the lab linked to Covid"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-clan-we-finally-know-the-identity-of-the-scientists-in-the-lab-linked-to-covid/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_beliefs
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
This is then added to the idea of "elite overproduction", which goes something like this:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypothesis
Paraphrasing, we have an overproduction of "elites" i.e. university educated people who in previous times would have demanded high salaries for jobs such as journalism or academia, but due to the change in the job market and the increasing precariousness of the middle class, we have produced too many humanities graduates who are educated but no longer command large salaries. This overly large class of people can no longer compete on traditional wealth based status symbols, so they use their belief system as a signifier of their class.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2023/06/rise-waterstones-dad-library-history-bookshops
https://twitter.com/MartinSLewis/status/1671789494918434818
Same sex marriage is conservative - yes it was important for same sex couples to have the same rights as any married couples, to visit the ill, to inherit, to live together - but it essentially assimilation into the heteronormative tradition. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" used to be about difference, not assimilation. Abortion is still illegal without 2 doctors signing off on it in this country. And again, dog whistle with "religious teachers" because you don't want a Muslim to teach students fundamental Islamism - you want a specific brand of traditional Christianity imposed on kids.
Starmer is going out with his shadow chancellor on TV every day saying that he won't do anything radical on the economy because of the "economic condition". A majority of TORY voters want public ownership of necessary utilities, and the Labour party is STILL ruling it out.
You call lefties permanent victims, and then complain that the poors are being allowed into the posh people unis, and that new money are lauded like some kind of Victorian Whig. We live in the world created by Thatcherism and Reaganism, by the neoliberal consensus, by capital and capitalism. You won; get over it.
I don't know what prompted me to. Just a feeling about Truss and the general economy, but I came back from holiday last year and fixed in early September for a decade. No IFA or anything. Just logged on and took the 10 year fixed that was offered.
I think doing this might've prevented otherwise serious financial hardship had I left it on standard variable (or even took a shorter deal at a lower rate).
IThers not much to suggest we have "flourished" in the EU,. The only areas which could make tha claim are London and the South East, the rest of the country has had slow decline .
https://www.which.co.uk/money/savings-and-isas/savings-accounts/what-is-a-savings-platform-aGVMf9r8q21C
Got 3.85 already with RCI who actually upped their rates without needing to be asked, too (and might yet again for all I know).
Still, that's only half inflation. But it's a damn sight better than some of the other banks. And if you are old or not able to use the net and can't get to a branch of a bank which does offer a decent rate, you are even more screwed.
Smart of you.
The issue is that on economics, there is no other game in town. History did end, capitalism won. Corbyn and Bernie get called bloody Marxists for wanting to do low level social democratic reforms which are all in aid of keeping capitalism from falling apart under it's own contradictions. So when capitalism is clearly failing but it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism, what do you have left?
On another note am I the only one fed up of the moralizing crap from people who seek to judge those who just wanted to own their own home . The situation was vastly different 20 years ago .
People took out mortgages and could never have envisaged the rapid change in interest rates over the space of just over a year.
There seems to be a lot of mean spiritedness about which I find appalling when some people are going to be sick with worry over what will happen to their mortgages .
And the H&W crane.
#BREAKING - Turkey's Central Bank hikes benchmark interest rate to 15% from 8.5%
https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1671836128977072128
It immoral, it is mad, but what do we do about it?
Looking at the numbers for producer prices (where prices are actually falling) this should feed through into consumer prices in coming months.
Ideally for the party CCHQ would drop truth bombs, but also have a plan to inspire recovery.
So far the only plan appears to be 'out Nimby the LDs'.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1671843222631378945
I do beleive that this is in part the fall out from that. It set us on a path during the 2010s which just pilled all the bad stuff into the future.
And of course things since that time, Brexit, Ukraine, Pandemic etc.
It was a bleak time for a lot of home owners and I witnessed it first hand
The government will take the hit but the country has had insanely low interest rates for far too long and that is the responsibility of the independent BOE
Corporations support things like Pride not because they care, but middle class people who are less likely to have children have large disposable incomes - they're chasing the market. We get the occasional side characters in media hinting they have a same sex relationship - but in a way that can be cut out for the Chinese market or Russia and India. Violent crimes against all queer people is skyrocketing, and has been since marriage equality was assured and the people who had us decided the easier wedge issue was trans people.
There is no pleasing me when people I know get called "faggot" for holding hands on the tube or have people following them threatening violence because they're "a bloke in a dress". There is no pleasing me when 1 in 4 of UKs homeless youth are LGBT. There is no pleasing me when we had a PM who referred to us as "bum boys" and have a PM who like to rally the troops by banging on about "women having penises".
I've had a look at some of Marriott's articles: here is a tasting
"Mob rule and cancel culture have had their day": https://archive.is/wwl0p
"Rage is swallowing even the middle ground": https://archive.is/GEMJH
"Even Old Etonians are fighting the elite": https://archive.is/SoMOc
If anybody wants to post more from Marriott instead of https://www.unherd.com/why-other-people-are-bad-and-we-should-kill-them or https://www.spectator.co.uk/my-opinion-is-really-important, then that would be good:
Even if Labour screw it up, which they probably will, the Conservatives deserve evisceration. The continuing criminal investigations and yet further revelations of abject unfitness for office will keep reminding people that the crisis was Torydom´s last act.
Against all expert views, you got your ridiculous Brexit, now I hope its your political epitaph.
Andrew Tate has offered to train Elon Musk for his forthcoming cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg.
But otherwise, I entirely agree with you - why pillory someone for making a decision which turns out to be bad (unless that someone happens to be a politician making a decision on your behalf, of course...) ?
Great debate.
Some of them even .... right wing!
Unfortunately supply and demand is likely to step in the way of that, because we have a massive shortage still, but your anecdote is really positive news. Hopefully your sale does go through to someone, at a cheap and reasonable amount. 👍
Whitty says 'extremely concerning' threats to expert advisers during Covid could undermine future disaster planning
Back at the Covid inquiry, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, says Britain has a strong network in place providing scientific advice to government for emergencies.
But he says there are two potential threats to this.
First, he says, universities are becoming more “hawkish”, which means they may be less willing to spare academics for this sort of work.
Second, he says, the amount of abuse, and in some cases threats, levelled at experts during Covid was “extremely concerning”, he says. He says society should be firm in saying how much it appreciates the work of these experts. Usually they are acting unpaid, he says.
The people who stand to lose out are those who expect unearnt property windfalls in the hundreds of thousands may suddenly find they have to earn their own money instead. In which case 🎻
I do feel your fury at Brexit is fundamentally about injured pride.
It's like nobody has learnt a bloody thing from previous busts. It was all too predictable that if rates returned to something like the norm, which frankly should have been pencilled in for years ago, a lot of people were going to end up in trouble again.
I'll say it again, some days I wonder how civilization manages to continue, nobody seems to have a clue what they are doing but we keep on ticking.
There needs to be a solution to the high interest rate problem because it means that one group (mortgage holders) are taking on the personal cost of controlling inflation to the benefit of another, ie those with savings. It isn't tenable.
We've had two decades of overheating property value growth. A bleak time isn't just overdue, its ridiculously long overdue.
And all the overheating that many home owners have loved - and encouraged by NIMBY policies - has led to a very bleak time for those who want to save a deposit to have their own time.
Consider this 'bleak' time some very much needed rainfall after a very long and for many very difficult drought.
Social democracy has never been about eliminating the wealthy, Simply about redistribution from the wealthy. Ours is a very redistributive system.
The current way isn't working, everyone knows it, and the tories are worried about IHT which affects a tiny level of people (mostly themselves).
Lets actually do things. scrap planning regulations so things can be built, but update the requirements so they have enough size and are green. Put tax breaks into new developements which fund lower cost higher density buildings (so we have more flats). Lets get infrastructure done.
Build build build and it'll solve so many issues. From housing to jobs and many more.
NAVY TO TORPEDO MIGRANTS
REGISTRATION PLATES FOR CYCLISTS
STARMER ATE A BACON ROLL
Would you bring your attention to me?
For a feast for your eyes to see
An explosion of catastrophe...
(Saliva, "Ladies and Gentlemen", 2007)
Those who think the government's unpopularity mid-term means it's on course for losing the next election are naive. Bookies love them.
Perhaps I misunderstood.
High migration isn’t proof of a ruling liberal elite: high migration is the result of Conservative Party policies.
And saying 65% of Oxford’s intake is from state schools is an odd way of saying the privately educated are still massively over-represented at Oxford.