If Britain is to rejoin the EU and make a success of it, it has to do so as a self-confident nation which joins because it wants to do so for positive reasons and in full understanding of and agreement with the direction of travel and what this means. Not because it is in a mess and feels that Brexit is a failure. That is to repeat the mistakes of the 1970's when Britain joined as the sick man of Europe.
Simply reversing Brexit is the worst possible basis for rejoining.
So it will take some considerable time.
And it would take a generous invitation from Germany/France. Maybe at the same time as Ukraine to give the thing a good vibe.
Labour's honeymoon starts and ends on election day.
There won't be one because there's been no seduction. They'll come to power with a large majority yet with nobody expecting much. It's almost unheard of and a terrific platform to start governing. Just a few modest achievements and no mega fuck ups will be thrashing expectations and should lead to at least one further term.
A large majority? Really?
Consensus on here and elsewhere seems to be heading that way.
Of course, sentiment might swing back... or strengthen further... Events, dear boy, events.
I mean to get a majority of one Labour needs to win 123 seats... That is an absolutely enormous number of seats to win historically . An opposition just doesn't go from 202 seats to a landslide majority in one go.
It's not going to happen.
Labour will probably scrape a majority but it'll be from 1-20 at best IMO.
History says you're right but...
Every election is different.
I am no fan of LAB or Starmer. I don't think many people are. But so many people - including as evidenced on here - think that this government is UTTER SHYTE and has no idea what they are doing.
So I think LAB could well be on for it although I think they are unlikely to get beyond 350.
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Only 15% of LEAVERS!, it's more than 70% or Remainers that want to Rejoin. Add in those wanting to rejoin the SM and its looking on the cards.
Genuine question.
Would you want to rejoin an EU where radical right parties were in the driving seat?
That's the way the EU is likely heading.
From the same Tory commentariat who’s predictions about the EU and Brexit have been wholly discredited.
It's not what you want to hear because in your eyes, and many of your fellow travellers, the EU is a left-liberals internationalist ideological wet dream.
But, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. If it doesn't, I expect long-held positions will rapidly reverse with some fascinating logical contortions along the way.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
Indeed, the GFC was caused by mortgages going bad, with the property not worth the debt. It could very easily happen again.
for Sunil and other PB trans(portation) advocates:
Take a virtual ride on Honolulu's soon-to-open new Skyline light rail system, heading west on segment from Aloha Stadium (near Pearl Harbor) to Kapolei.
Where’s good for a holiday in your part of the world SSI? Thinking of a road trip in the Northwest of my Wife’s homeland and my only visit was a brief one when taking a Greyhound from Vancouver to San Francisco.
How much time do you have, and how much road to you want to go tripping down (in a manner of speaking)?
Personally would be tempted to drive
> from Seattle to Port Angeles WA, then ferry to Victoria BC > from Vic via Swartz Bay > Tsawwassen ferry to Vancouver > from Vancouver to Banff via Trans-Canada & Coquihalla Highways to Banff NP > from Banff via Alberta to CN Waterton Lakes-US Glacier NP (> alternative from Van, take highway across southern BC just north of border to Crowsnest Pass, an amazing road crossing several mountain ranges interspersed with big lakes and valleys > from Waterton/Glacier west to Cour d'Alene ID then Spokane WA > from Spokane to Grand Coulee Dam and the not-to-be-missed Dry Falls > from Dry Falls to Wenatchee to Leavenworth to Stevens Pass and back to Seattle.
Plenty of alternatives along this general route.
For example, you can go from Seattle directly to Port Angeles via Bainbridge Island ferry; OR you can head down to Olympia, then west and north on US 101 to Pacific Coast then via Forks to PA from the west.
Oooh! That sounds promising! I may research that and follow up if I may.
@SeaShantyIrish2 what is a rough time and distance estimate for that please? My son lives in Banff and I need to fit a road trip around him.
Re: mileage, just guessing must be 1,200 or thereabouts (note that Spokane to Seattle about 300m.)
Time-wise, say a week or so without pushing it (that is yourself) too much.
Decades ago did road trip > 1st day = Seattle via Kamloops (bypassing Vancouver) and CN Glacier NP to Banff (took longer because I took old TCH via Fraser canyon instead of the freeway). > 2nd day = Banff via Calgary to US Glacier-CN Waterton Lakes NPs to Crowsnest Pass > 3rd day = Crowsnest Pass via BC highway north of border (in some case less than 10th of mile) to Vancouver > 4th day = Van to Sea.
for Sunil and other PB trans(portation) advocates:
Take a virtual ride on Honolulu's soon-to-open new Skyline light rail system, heading west on segment from Aloha Stadium (near Pearl Harbor) to Kapolei.
Where’s good for a holiday in your part of the world SSI? Thinking of a road trip in the Northwest of my Wife’s homeland and my only visit was a brief one when taking a Greyhound from Vancouver to San Francisco.
How much time do you have, and how much road to you want to go tripping down (in a manner of speaking)?
Personally would be tempted to drive
> from Seattle to Port Angeles WA, then ferry to Victoria BC > from Vic via Swartz Bay > Tsawwassen ferry to Vancouver > from Vancouver to Banff via Trans-Canada & Coquihalla Highways to Banff NP > from Banff via Alberta to CN Waterton Lakes-US Glacier NP (> alternative from Van, take highway across southern BC just north of border to Crowsnest Pass, an amazing road crossing several mountain ranges interspersed with big lakes and valleys > from Waterton/Glacier west to Cour d'Alene ID then Spokane WA > from Spokane to Grand Coulee Dam and the not-to-be-missed Dry Falls > from Dry Falls to Wenatchee to Leavenworth to Stevens Pass and back to Seattle.
Plenty of alternatives along this general route.
For example, you can go from Seattle directly to Port Angeles via Bainbridge Island ferry; OR you can head down to Olympia, then west and north on US 101 to Pacific Coast then via Forks to PA from the west.
Oooh! That sounds promising! I may research that and follow up if I may.
@SeaShantyIrish2 what is a rough time and distance estimate for that please? My son lives in Banff and I need to fit a road trip around him.
Re: mileage, just guessing must be 1,200 or thereabouts (note that Spokane to Seattle about 300m.)
Time-wise, say a week or so without pushing it (that is yourself) too much.
Decades ago did road trip > 1st day = Seattle via Kamloops (bypassing Vancouver) and CN Glacier NP to Banff (took longer because I took old TCH via Fraser canyon instead of the freeway). > 2nd day = Banff via Calgary to US Glacier-CN Waterton Lakes NPs to Crowsnest Pass > 3rd day = Crowsnest Pass via BC highway north of border (in some case less than 10th of mile) to Vancouver > 4th day = Van to Sea.
Reassuring this evening that the midsummer swallows are still looping overhead. And there are insects. If government wants a Brexit benefit then ban most insecticides and create maritime reserves around most of the coast.
I always find it a little sad that before we even reach the longest day most of the cuckoos are already on their way back across France to Africa. Such an iconic bird and yet it is here for such a short time. Just 8 weeks out of each year.
A truly shit lifestyle, though, iconic or not.
I have just been in the Shiants surrounded by puffins.
Did you actually land?!
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
Labour's honeymoon starts and ends on election day.
There won't be one because there's been no seduction. They'll come to power with a large majority yet with nobody expecting much. It's almost unheard of and a terrific platform to start governing. Just a few modest achievements and no mega fuck ups will be thrashing expectations and should lead to at least one further term.
A large majority? Really?
Consensus on here and elsewhere seems to be heading that way.
Of course, sentiment might swing back... or strengthen further... Events, dear boy, events.
I mean to get a majority of one Labour needs to win 123 seats... That is an absolutely enormous number of seats to win historically . An opposition just doesn't go from 202 seats to a landslide majority in one go.
It's not going to happen.
Labour will probably scrape a majority but it'll be from 1-20 at best IMO.
History says you're right but...
Every election is different.
I am no fan of LAB or Starmer. I don't think many people are. But so many people - including as evidenced on here - think that this government is UTTER SHYTE and has no idea what they are doing.
So I think LAB could well be on for it although I think they are unlikely to get beyond 350.
It's a tough ask, even now. But whilst 2024 will not be 1997 or 2010 exactly, I think it would be reasonable to conclude whether the weight of evidence is leaning more to one than the other.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Only 15% of LEAVERS!, it's more than 70% or Remainers that want to Rejoin. Add in those wanting to rejoin the SM and its looking on the cards.
Genuine question.
Would you want to rejoin an EU where radical right parties were in the driving seat?
That's the way the EU is likely heading.
From the same Tory commentariat who’s predictions about the EU and Brexit have been wholly discredited.
It's not what you want to hear because in your eyes, and many of your fellow travellers, the EU is a left-liberals internationalist ideological wet dream.
But, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. If it doesn't, I expect long-held positions will rapidly reverse with some fascinating logical contortions along the way.
I will let the insult pass as your dream of Brexit lies discredited and is already becoming a bad punchline but I am fully aware of the problems and limitations of the EU. They were amongst the reasons we left.
I am also aware, despite your side’s oppression fantasies, that we were a large and influential member and had the ability to change the EU - as we did by creating the Single Market and driving the accession of the eastern states over French objections. We have, and hopefully will again, drive the direction of the EU to fix its many many flaws.
Pretending we were simultaneously superior and subservient to a mythical “superstate”, as you did and do, has proved to be an obvious falsehood. Brexit has damaged everyone in Europe - just us more than everyone else.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
How peculiar that you date ALL of our problems back to the "80s", like the 70s was an economic golden-time, from which we sadly diverged
But Tory members are so high up the demographic curve that they are dying off at an alarming rate...
No they are not. Given life expectancies and the late-life care which your older Conservative Party member can no doubt afford, somebody mid-seventies will have about fifteen years in front of them. Unpleasant years, but still there and still capable of putting a cross on a postal vote form.
We keep saying that they are dying off, but there are A LOT of pensioners and for around the next ten-fifteen years they will remain the dominant force in British politics. When it switches it will switch fast as they begin to be outnumbered by younger votes in sufficient proportion to outweigh differential turnout by age, but until then it will be pensionerism all the way...
Even then the median voter will be aged 50 still not 30
Taking into account both raw demographics and propensity to vote, I believe that the median voter is aged about 55. This value is likely to keep creeping slowly up for the foreseeable, because so many younger people aren't forming families for various reasons, not least the crippling cost. Yet another issue that can be put down to the full spectrum catastrophe that is the British property market.
Not that this is any real use to the Conservatives in the long run, because people are no longer moving rightwards as they age. Being the party of the landed interest - minted pensioner owner-occupiers, their heirs and rentiers - only wins elections so long as there are enough of those people around to keep voting for you. Those who have neither significant assets nor any realistic prospect of accruing them have nothing to conserve and, consequently, no use for conservatism.
By 55 plenty are starting to inherit property (and most should have bought a property with a mortgage well before then anyway).
I'm 56. I don't know many of my cohort who have lost both parents.
By 56 if your parents had you at 30 they would be 86. On average most are dead by 86
But my parents weren't 30.
Nor were many parents
I was 22 when our eldest was born
And I would just say @HYUFD is utterly obsessed with inheritance, when most people's estate will be greatly reduced by care fees for their parents
And now average age of first child is over 30, so even more likely your parents will be dead by the time you reach 56.
Only 25% will need care home fees
Not in our family so far
Indeed our son in law has just paid nearly £300,000 for his parents care before they passed
Your love of inheritance is at times just distasteful
Why? Preserving family wealth is part of the core essence of Toryism and has been for centuries.
Yes 25% will need care costs like your son in law's parents, 75% won't however
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
for Sunil and other PB trans(portation) advocates:
Take a virtual ride on Honolulu's soon-to-open new Skyline light rail system, heading west on segment from Aloha Stadium (near Pearl Harbor) to Kapolei.
Where’s good for a holiday in your part of the world SSI? Thinking of a road trip in the Northwest of my Wife’s homeland and my only visit was a brief one when taking a Greyhound from Vancouver to San Francisco.
How much time do you have, and how much road to you want to go tripping down (in a manner of speaking)?
Personally would be tempted to drive
> from Seattle to Port Angeles WA, then ferry to Victoria BC > from Vic via Swartz Bay > Tsawwassen ferry to Vancouver > from Vancouver to Banff via Trans-Canada & Coquihalla Highways to Banff NP > from Banff via Alberta to CN Waterton Lakes-US Glacier NP (> alternative from Van, take highway across southern BC just north of border to Crowsnest Pass, an amazing road crossing several mountain ranges interspersed with big lakes and valleys > from Waterton/Glacier west to Cour d'Alene ID then Spokane WA > from Spokane to Grand Coulee Dam and the not-to-be-missed Dry Falls > from Dry Falls to Wenatchee to Leavenworth to Stevens Pass and back to Seattle.
Plenty of alternatives along this general route.
For example, you can go from Seattle directly to Port Angeles via Bainbridge Island ferry; OR you can head down to Olympia, then west and north on US 101 to Pacific Coast then via Forks to PA from the west.
Oooh! That sounds promising! I may research that and follow up if I may.
@SeaShantyIrish2 what is a rough time and distance estimate for that please? My son lives in Banff and I need to fit a road trip around him.
Re: mileage, just guessing must be 1,200 or thereabouts (note that Spokane to Seattle about 300m.)
Time-wise, say a week or so without pushing it (that is yourself) too much.
Decades ago did road trip > 1st day = Seattle via Kamloops (bypassing Vancouver) and CN Glacier NP to Banff (took longer because I took old TCH via Fraser canyon instead of the freeway). > 2nd day = Banff via Calgary to US Glacier-CN Waterton Lakes NPs to Crowsnest Pass > 3rd day = Crowsnest Pass via BC highway north of border (in some case less than 10th of mile) to Vancouver > 4th day = Van to Sea.
Thanks, sounds just what I want
Fun facts:
> Glacier National Park, Canada (British Columbia) pronounced "GLASS-ee-er" > Glacier National Park, United States (Montana) pronounced "GLAY-sher"
AND when you order a (fountain) soft drink > in United States 99.46% of time, served with ice in glass > in Canada 99.46% of time, served without ice
Can you forage that samphire? It's up there with fresh asparagus among the very best vegetables in my book.
On which subject, we cut our last asparagus of the year yesterday. We cut the first on 24th April and we've had super-fresh asparagus pretty much every other day since, so sad to see it stop but the poor plants will need time to recover now.
Still, the peas and courgettes have started cropping!
You can. But it seems a shame to disturb it. I agree with you about the taste.
Also very envious about the asparagus. When I get my veg garden going - it's herbs and fruit trees at the moment - that will be one of the veg I will grow.
Do use the courgette flowers - deep fried very quickly in a light batter - scrumptious!
We have tried that and yes, very nice, but we don't have a deep fat fryer and don't really do any deep frying.
Don't delay planting the asparagus crowns - they take a few years to get established but once they are settled in they are very rewarding.
Reassuring this evening that the midsummer swallows are still looping overhead. And there are insects. If government wants a Brexit benefit then ban most insecticides and create maritime reserves around most of the coast.
I always find it a little sad that before we even reach the longest day most of the cuckoos are already on their way back across France to Africa. Such an iconic bird and yet it is here for such a short time. Just 8 weeks out of each year.
A truly shit lifestyle, though, iconic or not.
I have just been in the Shiants surrounded by puffins.
Did you actually land?!
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
Yes. A sailing expedition in a flat calm has the advantages of its disadvantages if you see what I mean. Very sociable day actually, was sailing with Australian sheep farmers and it turned out to be shearing day on the island so lots of technical chat.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
Indeed, the GFC was caused by mortgages going bad, with the property not worth the debt. It could very easily happen again.
The funny thing about the GFC is that it was not caused by subprime mortgages, as many people think. They were a sign of overheating but were not really the problem, which was mortgages across the board. Had it been just subprime mortgagees who could not repay, the problem would have been contained by the stratification of derivatives, as designed.
To be honest it's very unlikely that a nuclear weapon would be used at the plant. But a major explosion inside could be a radiation disaster. The Russian army is full of criminals and bandits. It's highly dysfunctional. Their leaders are ruthless and without a shred of concern for human suffering. There is a logic that if they are losing on the battlefield they might as well do as much damage to Ukraine as possible. Make sure any Ukrainian 'victory' is a pyrrhic one.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
Maybe but if the distressed sales go to PE or corporate landlords (rather than just dropping prices for ordinary homebuyers) we could end up in an even worse situation if they move rents and profits offshore, away from HMRC.
Reassuring this evening that the midsummer swallows are still looping overhead. And there are insects. If government wants a Brexit benefit then ban most insecticides and create maritime reserves around most of the coast.
I always find it a little sad that before we even reach the longest day most of the cuckoos are already on their way back across France to Africa. Such an iconic bird and yet it is here for such a short time. Just 8 weeks out of each year.
A truly shit lifestyle, though, iconic or not.
I have just been in the Shiants surrounded by puffins.
Did you actually land?!
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
Yes. A sailing expedition in a flat calm has the advantages of its disadvantages if you see what I mean. Very sociable day actually, was sailing with Australian sheep farmers and it turned out to be shearing day on the island so lots of technical chat.
To be honest it's very unlikely that a nuclear weapon would be used at the plant. But a major explosion inside could be a radiation disaster. The Russian army is full of criminals and bandits. It's highly dysfunctional. Their leaders are ruthless and without a shred of concern for human suffering. There is a logic that if they are losing on the battlefield they might as well do as much damage to Ukraine as possible. Make sure any Ukrainian 'victory' is a pyrrhic one.
The reaction to the dam getting knocked out feels a bit Salisbury to me.
Hindsight, but we didn't make enough of a fuss. And if the rumours about tentative Ukrainian breakthroughs are true...
Traditionally have an ante post football Yankee across the four divisions. Am thinking. City 4-6. (Combine that with one other and I'm in profit). Leicester 6-1 Bolton 8-1 Notts County 10-1 (Wrexham are ridiculously short). Haven't thrown a big wild card outsider this year. What do others think? Would appreciate any reasonably specialist info @foxy and others. Don't know if our Forest fans know much about County?
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Huh? 15% of people who voted leave want to rejoin the entity they expressly voted to leave? That’s brilliant for Rejoiners. Because they are now in the Rejoin camp. Do you see how this works?
I do and it does not change my view it is not likely in the foreseeable future
Indeed did you not recently post in this vein
If I read a poll saying that 15% of 2019 Labour voters were switching to the Tories I’d revise my opinion on the next General Election. And equally this poll has made me drastically reconsider the question
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
The trouble is we are not talking about 15% rates. What were earnings rising by at that time? We are talking about interest at 5% whilst earnings are rising at 7%. In other words we are at the end of a period of cheap money and credit. Of course people were encouraged to borrow to the hilt whilst rates were low to 'keep the economy going.'
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
How peculiar that you date ALL of our problems back to the "80s", like the 70s was an economic golden-time, from which we sadly diverged
Twit
We don't live in the settlement created by Jim Callaghan though, do we? We live in the settlement created by Margaret Thatcher.
The 1970s were a mess but the leaders of the 1970s aren't responsible for the paucity and lack of affordability of housing today. More homes were completed in 1979 than in any year since, even though the population of the country has grown by about 20% between then and now.
Is it just possible that, for all the good she may have done in some areas, Mrs Thatcher (and all of her successors of both parties, who have effectively embraced her model of low volume, mainly private sector housebuilding and resultant runaway property price inflation) might just have screwed up in this crucial respect? Do you not comprehend all of the problems that are created by an inadequate supply of hugely overpriced homes, for anyone save a minority of very lucky owner-occupiers?
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
606,000 net immigration upto June 22 also does not support the claim of shrunken immigration
Yes, it's a nonsense
However it is not nonsense that Brexit will get the blame for everything for somt time, just as the EU got the blame for years. That is human psychology. Not much to be done. Just hope we move on, soon or eventually
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
606,000 net immigration upto June 22 also does not support the claim of shrunken immigration
That’s deliberately misleading and you should be ashamed. The quote says “ shrunken workforce ” which is not the same thing as “ shrunken immigration “ as you well know. They are two different issues. All EU immigrants had the right to work even if some didn’t. Now a vast proportion of people we allow in, asylum seekers for example, are deliberately kept out of the workforce. This misquoting and distortion does you no credit.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
Maybe but if the distressed sales go to PE or corporate landlords (rather than just dropping prices for ordinary homebuyers) we could end up in an even worse situation if they move rents and profits offshore, away from HMRC.
One thing that an incoming Labour Government could do without having to commit to spending more money is to place severe regulatory restrictions on the ability of foreign rentiers to operate in the UK. That would deal with that particular thorny problem at least.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
606,000 net immigration upto June 22 also does not support the claim of shrunken immigration
Yes, it's a nonsense
However it is not nonsense that Brexit will get the blame for everything for somt time, just as the EU got the blame for years. That is human psychology. Not much to be done. Just hope we move on, soon or eventually
Big G’s post was nonsense - deliberately conflating “workforce” with “immigration” - a claim the article does not make.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
Isn't part of the difference between then and now the massive disparity in the propensity of variable rate and fixed rate mortgages?
It might well be working now if everyone was on SVR, but they're not so, we can't tell yet because the hurt will only come in the step changes when large numbers of people roll off one fixed term deal onto another at a much higher rate.
Rather than boiling the frog slowly, we're amputating it a limb at at a time - or something?
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
It is not a happy prospect at all
This could rapidly become a crisis of enormous consequences
Certainly not happy for a lot of people, but then again it's a major opportunity for others.
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
How peculiar that you date ALL of our problems back to the "80s", like the 70s was an economic golden-time, from which we sadly diverged
Twit
We don't live in the settlement created by Jim Callaghan though, do we? We live in the settlement created by Margaret Thatcher.
The 1970s were a mess but the leaders of the 1970s aren't responsible for the paucity and lack of affordability of housing today. More homes were completed in 1979 than in any year since, even though the population of the country has grown by about 20% between then and now.
Is it just possible that, for all the good she may have done in some areas, Mrs Thatcher (and all of her successors of both parties, who have effectively embraced her model of low volume, mainly private sector housebuilding and resultant runaway property price inflation) might just have screwed up in this crucial respect? Do you not comprehend all of the problems that are created by an inadequate supply of hugely overpriced homes, for anyone save a minority of very lucky owner-occupiers?
Yes, seeing as I am personally supporting an entire family stuck in this renting situation; I know it all too well. A person on a very healthy salary - £50k+ - cannot buy a suitable property in London
The desire to blame FATCHA is simply embarrassing. It is adolescent. There are multiple reasons for this situation. One of them is, without question, that Thatcher made London successful again. She deregulated the City, tamed the unions, created Canary Wharf - under her watch London's declining population (shrinking since 1939) bottomed out, then started growing again (I believe the nadir was 86-87). People are attracted to successful cities, so they came to London, under Thatcher, Now London is as big as it has ever been, partly because New Labour opened the migration floodgates to Eastern Europe. A Labour choice
Outside London and the SE houses are largely affordable. I have young relatives who can buy on fairly average salaries, no problem
Your simplistic economic gibberish does not work on a sophisticated site like PB.com. Go away and try again
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
As soon as you get into the details you find that even most Remainers opposed free movement, which all by itself rules out the EEA/SM, because the EU is not going to start picking the Single Market apart*, and that probably makes even joining EFTA on its own fairly pointless.
I've no doubt that people are unhappy with Brexit, by the idea that there is any sort of clear mandate for rejoining the EU as it is — this is key, the real EU, not some fantasy version that never existed — has not been borne out in any detailed polling to the best of my knowledge. Sadly few organisations seem to be willing to do such polling, probably because it's not cheap.
* We would never have even had a referendum if the EU was willing to make such changes. Not that there would have been any point, the UK public would overwhelmingly back an à la carte EU.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Yep they found better paid jobs…
Currently outside of some EU countries unemployment rates are very low
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Charles Murray predicted it, kinda, in The Bell Curve
The Cognitive Elite, he called it, tho he probably put too much emphasis on Cognitive and not enough on Elite
Traditionally have an ante post football Yankee across the four divisions. Am thinking. City 4-6. (Combine that with one other and I'm in profit). Leicester 6-1 Bolton 8-1 Notts County 10-1 (Wrexham are ridiculously short). Haven't thrown a big wild card outsider this year. What do others think? Would appreciate any reasonably specialist info @foxy and others. Don't know if our Forest fans know much about County?
If we kicked off the Championship today, Leicester would walk it. The challenge is that a lot of their best players will leave and it is then up to an (untested manager) to try and get adequate replacements. I would hold off betting until closer to the start of the season
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Inheritance tax needs to be larger, and have no allowance for anyone other than a spouse/partner, or some dependents in particular circumstances. In fact have a maximum inheritance too, with a 100% rate above that.
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Inheritance tax needs to be larger, and have no allowance for anyone other than a spouse/partner, or some dependents in particular circumstances. In fact have a maximum inheritance too, with a 100% rate above that.
@HYUFD will have an aneurysm. Will no one stand up for the landed gentry?
Traditionally have an ante post football Yankee across the four divisions. Am thinking. City 4-6. (Combine that with one other and I'm in profit). Leicester 6-1 Bolton 8-1 Notts County 10-1 (Wrexham are ridiculously short). Haven't thrown a big wild card outsider this year. What do others think? Would appreciate any reasonably specialist info @foxy and others. Don't know if our Forest fans know much about County?
If we kicked off the Championship today, Leicester would walk it. The challenge is that a lot of their best players will leave and it is then up to an (untested manager) to try and get adequate replacements. I would hold off betting until closer to the start of the season
Yeah. I am doing. I usually do it in the week before the first games (the odds will change to reflect of course). That's pretty much my thinking. Thought 6 was a bit generous at this stage. They are clearly ahead just now. It's mostly a bit of fun, so that I can support a team for the season in each league. Many thanks.
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Charles Murray predicted it, kinda, in The Bell Curve
The Cognitive Elite, he called it, tho he probably put too much emphasis on Cognitive and not enough on Elite
Except many more people have a chance of inheriting a house worth £500k+ now than will ever enter the top 10% of earners let alone the top 1% of earners
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
The poll from INSA which has CDU/CSU on 20.5% with the AfD and SPD tied on 20%, so it wouldn't be surprising if we get a poll soon which has them in the lead.
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents for a TA are a statutory obligation, enforceable by Law. Yet we continue to advertise at minimum wage. When Aldi are paying a quid more an hour. And offering all the same term time working. At some stage (probably next year) it falls apart. It's either more immigration or a huge pay rise. I favour the latter, but then the bedwetters object to paying more tax, and inflation, and interest rates It's a Gordian knot.
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
To be honest it's very unlikely that a nuclear weapon would be used at the plant. But a major explosion inside could be a radiation disaster. The Russian army is full of criminals and bandits. It's highly dysfunctional. Their leaders are ruthless and without a shred of concern for human suffering. There is a logic that if they are losing on the battlefield they might as well do as much damage to Ukraine as possible. Make sure any Ukrainian 'victory' is a pyrrhic one.
The reaction to the dam getting knocked out feels a bit Salisbury to me.
Hindsight, but we didn't make enough of a fuss. And if the rumours about tentative Ukrainian breakthroughs are true...
I said at the time that there had to be consequences for Russia for destroying the dam, or they'd feel emboldened to do similar with the nuclear plant. As did others. You didn't need hindsight to see it.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents for a TA are a statutory obligation, enforceable by Law. Yet we continue to advertise at minimum wage. When Aldi are paying a quid more an hour. And offering all the same term time working. At some stage (probably next year) it falls apart. It's either more immigration or a huge pay rise. I favour the latter, but then the bedwetters object to paying more tax, and inflation, and interest rates It's a Gordian knot.
The country has two options. One is to pay more for the services we currently use. The other is to accept that we're going to have worse services.
It would be lovely to get more for less... But it's not happening and I don't think it is possible.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents are a statutory obligation
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents for a TA are a statutory obligation, enforceable by Law. Yet we continue to advertise at minimum wage. When Aldi are paying a quid more an hour. And offering all the same term time working. At some stage (probably next year) it falls apart. It's either more immigration or a huge pay rise. I favour the latter, but then the bedwetters object to paying more tax, and inflation, and interest rates It's a Gordian knot.
The country has two options. One is to pay more for the services we currently use. The other is to accept that we're going to have worse services.
It would be lovely to get more for less... But it's not happening and I don't think it is possible.
Issue is. Statutory services are simply not being provided. Because no one will work for the money offered. At some stage the compensation through the courts will outweigh the relatively measly pay rises to compete with Lidl.
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Huh? 15% of people who voted leave want to rejoin the entity they expressly voted to leave? That’s brilliant for Rejoiners. Because they are now in the Rejoin camp. Do you see how this works?
I do and it does not change my view it is not likely in the foreseeable future
Indeed did you not recently post in this vein
If I read a poll saying that 15% of 2019 Labour voters were switching to the Tories I’d revise my opinion on the next General Election. And equally this poll has made me drastically reconsider the question
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
This discussion appears to revolve around a hypothetical in/out rejoin question that this poll does not ask. Nevertheless, if a ballot was presented with the 6 options given, rejoin would win with a clear plurality, with a lead of 21% over the next preferred option.
But perhaps we should look at the binary question, in/out, we are discussing, a question conveniently answered in the same paper the previous poll was taken from -
Scroll down to figure 3, voting intention in a hypothetical in/out referendum today, you’ll see that 71% of leavers would vote to stay out compared to 84% of remainers who would vote to rejoin. That means that remain has hung onto significantly more of its 2016 voters than leave has done which, given the clusterfuck the whole thing has been, is hardly surprising.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents are a statutory obligation
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Thing is. Here we are. We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents for a TA are a statutory obligation, enforceable by Law. Yet we continue to advertise at minimum wage. When Aldi are paying a quid more an hour. And offering all the same term time working. At some stage (probably next year) it falls apart. It's either more immigration or a huge pay rise. I favour the latter, but then the bedwetters object to paying more tax, and inflation, and interest rates It's a Gordian knot.
The country has two options. One is to pay more for the services we currently use. The other is to accept that we're going to have worse services.
It would be lovely to get more for less... But it's not happening and I don't think it is possible.
Issue is. Statutory services are simply not being provided. Because no one will work for the money offered. At some stage the compensation through the courts will outweigh the relatively measly pay rises to compete with Lidl.
Fully agree. There are two rubbish options here- cut the statutory minimum service or pay more.
I don't think the government wants to do either of those.
23.14 BST The Wall Street Journal reports that a “top secret US navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission”.
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
Anybody got a bomb to drop on the studio? It would increase the country’s IQ by 10% if you could get rid of some Brexiteers - especially Essex Brexiteers.
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Huh? 15% of people who voted leave want to rejoin the entity they expressly voted to leave? That’s brilliant for Rejoiners. Because they are now in the Rejoin camp. Do you see how this works?
I do and it does not change my view it is not likely in the foreseeable future
Indeed did you not recently post in this vein
If I read a poll saying that 15% of 2019 Labour voters were switching to the Tories I’d revise my opinion on the next General Election. And equally this poll has made me drastically reconsider the question
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
This discussion appears to revolve around a hypothetical in/out rejoin question that this poll does not ask. Nevertheless, if a ballot was presented with the 6 options given, rejoin would win with a clear plurality, with a lead of 21% over the next preferred option.
But perhaps we should look at the binary question, in/out, we are discussing, a question conveniently answered in the same paper the previous poll was taken from -
Scroll down to figure 3, voting intention in a hypothetical in/out referendum today, you’ll see that 71% of leavers would vote to stay out compared to 84% of remainers who would vote to rejoin. That means that remain has hung onto significantly more of its 2016 voters than leave has done which, given the clusterfuck the whole thing has been, is hardly surprising.
Given the way in which the Goverment is viewed I would say it is very surprising. I would have expected the Rejoin number to be far higher.
As I have said on here regularly before, much of the antipathy towards Brexit currently is a substitute for animosity towards the Tories who have performed so badly in the years since. Once they are gone and we have a vaguely competant (or at least not so obviously corrupt) Government again I suspect Brexit will cease to be the toxic subject it is at the moment. Not least because I expect Starner to have a transfomative attitude to his relationship with the EU.
Also worth remembering that there are plenty of people out there who would be happy with the EFTA/EEA option going forward including many Brexit voters. (Your annual reminder that I did a PB thread header on this very subject the day after the vote in 2016.)
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Huh? 15% of people who voted leave want to rejoin the entity they expressly voted to leave? That’s brilliant for Rejoiners. Because they are now in the Rejoin camp. Do you see how this works?
I do and it does not change my view it is not likely in the foreseeable future
Indeed did you not recently post in this vein
If I read a poll saying that 15% of 2019 Labour voters were switching to the Tories I’d revise my opinion on the next General Election. And equally this poll has made me drastically reconsider the question
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
This discussion appears to revolve around a hypothetical in/out rejoin question that this poll does not ask. Nevertheless, if a ballot was presented with the 6 options given, rejoin would win with a clear plurality, with a lead of 21% over the next preferred option.
But perhaps we should look at the binary question, in/out, we are discussing, a question conveniently answered in the same paper the previous poll was taken from -
Scroll down to figure 3, voting intention in a hypothetical in/out referendum today, you’ll see that 71% of leavers would vote to stay out compared to 84% of remainers who would vote to rejoin. That means that remain has hung onto significantly more of its 2016 voters than leave has done which, given the clusterfuck the whole thing has been, is hardly surprising.
Oh and worth pointing out that YOU were the one jumping up and down about how transformative that particular poll was. To then claim it is not as important as you made out in response to an obvious challenge seems... petulant?
23.14 BST The Wall Street Journal reports that a “top secret US navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission”.
Guardian live blog.
They forgot to mention it? The fact they have a sensor net like that is hardly top secret.
23.14 BST The Wall Street Journal reports that a “top secret US navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission”.
Guardian live blog.
Question: how is something that's "top secret" being reported on?
Ask the Wall Street Journal, but they do say:
The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns.
Having said that, it's hardly a secret that the US, and no doubt other countries, have very sensitive detection systems in place in the North Atlantic.
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Inheritance tax needs to be larger, and have no allowance for anyone other than a spouse/partner, or some dependents in particular circumstances. In fact have a maximum inheritance too, with a 100% rate above that.
Why? What right does the Government have to take 100% of something? It isa bullshit idea. All it will do is encourage people to downsize, putting more pressure on the smaller house market and or have everyone use those equity relase schemes and spend everything on foreign holidays. (Which personally I would like to see my Mum do but which I would not seek to impose on others)
I've been trying to get my head around the strength of the physical forces that would have acted on the sub, water coming in fast enough to cut you in half, or just simply 'explode', which it obviously can't do because of the pressure involved on the sub makes an explosion impossible.
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
Any theories on why it would happen
Carbon fibre for pressure vessels has a troubled history.
Submarine pressure hulls (metal) are often limited to x number of compression/decompression cycles.
Even if the carbon fibre starts out perfect, the repeated compression cycle will eventually cause failure. The layers of carbon fibre will start to delaminate.
The safety engineer who got fired, stated that the quality of the layup of the carbon fibre was far from perfect. He also said that the quality was untested, directly. And that the system to monitor failure in the carbon fibre wouldn’t work, since it would only give an indication when it was already too late.
In addition the end cap and window for the vessel weren’t rated for 4000m.
So all in all, it probably wasn't a great idea to dive to the Titanic in it?
Just reflecting that 3500 m is about 350 bar pressure - ie 350 atmospheres. 5000lb psi, just about. The *peak* pressure in a diesel cylinder is about two-thirds of that for a turbocharged diesel.
If it failed, the phenomenon called dieseling probably occurred - the pressure rise would have been so sudden and violent that the contents of the pressure hull would have exploded like the charge in a diesel engine cylinder.
So implosion, taking milliseconds, followed by an explosion.
On the upside, certain death, faster than you could start to realise something was happening, let alone feel pain.
Catastrophic Implosion of a submersible explained:
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second.
The time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors.
When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine.
The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
I've been trying to get my head around the strength of the physical forces that would have acted on the sub, water coming in fast enough to cut you in half, or just simply 'explode', which it obviously can't do because of the pressure involved on the sub makes an explosion impossible.
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
Any theories on why it would happen
Carbon fibre for pressure vessels has a troubled history.
Submarine pressure hulls (metal) are often limited to x number of compression/decompression cycles.
Even if the carbon fibre starts out perfect, the repeated compression cycle will eventually cause failure. The layers of carbon fibre will start to delaminate.
The safety engineer who got fired, stated that the quality of the layup of the carbon fibre was far from perfect. He also said that the quality was untested, directly. And that the system to monitor failure in the carbon fibre wouldn’t work, since it would only give an indication when it was already too late.
In addition the end cap and window for the vessel weren’t rated for 4000m.
So all in all, it probably wasn't a great idea to dive to the Titanic in it?
Just reflecting that 3500 m is about 350 bar pressure - ie 350 atmospheres. 5000lb psi, just about. The *peak* pressure in a diesel cylinder is about two-thirds of that for a turbocharged diesel.
If it failed, the phenomenon called dieseling probably occurred - the pressure rise would have been so sudden and violent that the contents of the pressure hull would have exploded like the charge in a diesel engine cylinder.
So implosion, taking milliseconds, followed by an explosion.
On the upside, certain death, faster than you could start to realise something was happening, let alone feel pain.
Catastrophic Implosion of a submersible explained:
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second.
The time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors.
When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine.
The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
Only 15% want to rejoin is devastating for those who make a daily effort to promote everything pro EU
Huh? 15% of people who voted leave want to rejoin the entity they expressly voted to leave? That’s brilliant for Rejoiners. Because they are now in the Rejoin camp. Do you see how this works?
I do and it does not change my view it is not likely in the foreseeable future
Indeed did you not recently post in this vein
If I read a poll saying that 15% of 2019 Labour voters were switching to the Tories I’d revise my opinion on the next General Election. And equally this poll has made me drastically reconsider the question
Hmm. Very partial reading of the poll from you there Doug I am afraid.
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
This discussion appears to revolve around a hypothetical in/out rejoin question that this poll does not ask. Nevertheless, if a ballot was presented with the 6 options given, rejoin would win with a clear plurality, with a lead of 21% over the next preferred option.
But perhaps we should look at the binary question, in/out, we are discussing, a question conveniently answered in the same paper the previous poll was taken from -
Scroll down to figure 3, voting intention in a hypothetical in/out referendum today, you’ll see that 71% of leavers would vote to stay out compared to 84% of remainers who would vote to rejoin. That means that remain has hung onto significantly more of its 2016 voters than leave has done which, given the clusterfuck the whole thing has been, is hardly surprising.
Given the way in which the Goverment is viewed I would say it is very surprising. I would have expected the Rejoin number to be far higher.
As I have said on here regularly before, much of the antipathy towards Brexit currently is a substitute for animosity towards the Tories who have performed so badly in the years since. Once they are gone and we have a vaguely competant (or at least not so obviously corrupt) Government again I suspect Brexit will cease to be the toxic subject it is at the moment. Not least because I expect Starner to have a transfomative attitude to his relationship with the EU.
Also worth remembering that there are plenty of people out there who would be happy with the EFTA/EEA option going forward including many Brexit voters. (Your annual reminder that I did a PB thread header on this very subject the day after the vote in 2016.)
On the flip side, to have a government in power that is not ideologically wedded to Brexit means a space opens up for the government to start shifting blame* for problems it faces onto Brexit.
To have ministers talking much more about challenges created by Brexit could easily have a transformative effect on the state of the rejoin debate without even that government endorsing such a goal.
*whether or not it's justified
The problem you have is that you already have lots of people blaming Brexit for everything and, even though the Government - the main advocate of Brexit - is vastly unpopular, they are still not making headway. Unless Starmer intendds to start talking about rejoin within the first year of his forst term he will miss any opptyunity to play teh 'Brexit caused this' card. From that point on it will be a toxic card to play as more and more people turn against the Govenment (as they inevitably do no matter how unfair it is).
Right now we are at peak rejoin (at least until a few months after the next election). From that point on Rejoin is screwed.
To be honest it's very unlikely that a nuclear weapon would be used at the plant. But a major explosion inside could be a radiation disaster. The Russian army is full of criminals and bandits. It's highly dysfunctional. Their leaders are ruthless and without a shred of concern for human suffering. There is a logic that if they are losing on the battlefield they might as well do as much damage to Ukraine as possible. Make sure any Ukrainian 'victory' is a pyrrhic one.
The reaction to the dam getting knocked out feels a bit Salisbury to me.
Hindsight, but we didn't make enough of a fuss. And if the rumours about tentative Ukrainian breakthroughs are true...
I said at the time that there had to be consequences for Russia for destroying the dam, or they'd feel emboldened to do similar with the nuclear plant. As did others. You didn't need hindsight to see it.
I fear this is going to be the story of the next week. I hope the Ukrainians’ warnings will be heeded in the West.
I've been trying to get my head around the strength of the physical forces that would have acted on the sub, water coming in fast enough to cut you in half, or just simply 'explode', which it obviously can't do because of the pressure involved on the sub makes an explosion impossible.
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
Any theories on why it would happen
Carbon fibre for pressure vessels has a troubled history.
Submarine pressure hulls (metal) are often limited to x number of compression/decompression cycles.
Even if the carbon fibre starts out perfect, the repeated compression cycle will eventually cause failure. The layers of carbon fibre will start to delaminate.
The safety engineer who got fired, stated that the quality of the layup of the carbon fibre was far from perfect. He also said that the quality was untested, directly. And that the system to monitor failure in the carbon fibre wouldn’t work, since it would only give an indication when it was already too late.
In addition the end cap and window for the vessel weren’t rated for 4000m.
So all in all, it probably wasn't a great idea to dive to the Titanic in it?
Just reflecting that 3500 m is about 350 bar pressure - ie 350 atmospheres. 5000lb psi, just about. The *peak* pressure in a diesel cylinder is about two-thirds of that for a turbocharged diesel.
If it failed, the phenomenon called dieseling probably occurred - the pressure rise would have been so sudden and violent that the contents of the pressure hull would have exploded like the charge in a diesel engine cylinder.
So implosion, taking milliseconds, followed by an explosion.
On the upside, certain death, faster than you could start to realise something was happening, let alone feel pain.
Catastrophic Implosion of a submersible explained:
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second.
The time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors.
When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine.
The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
I think this is one aspect of the whole sad event that I can very happily not know anything about. Not something to dwell on (I mean for me personally, I am not saying people shouldn't discuss it if it interests them)
'Voters prefer the Tory party of today to its predecessors – but all voters prefer the Labour Party of Tony Blair to that of Starmer or Corbyn
26% of voters preferred the Conservative Party of today, 25% preferred the party of Thatcher, and 16% chose the party of Cameron. Among Tory voters, the figures were 50%, 26% and 18% respectively. For Labour, 32% of voters chose the party of Blair, 18% the party of today, and 16% the party of Corbyn. Among Labour voters, the figures were 39%, 30% and 22%.'
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
Anybody got a bomb to drop on the studio? It would increase the country’s IQ by 10% if you could get rid of some Brexiteers - especially Essex Brexiteers.
What a repulsive comment? And you wonder why 52% voted Leave when you have such contempt for them!
'Voters prefer the Tory party of today to its predecessors – but all voters prefer the Labour Party of Tony Blair to that of Starmer or Corbyn
26% of voters preferred the Conservative Party of today, 25% preferred the party of Thatcher, and 16% chose the party of Cameron. Among Tory voters, the figures were 50%, 26% and 18% respectively. For Labour, 32% of voters chose the party of Blair, 18% the party of today, and 16% the party of Corbyn. Among Labour voters, the figures were 39%, 30% and 22%.'
...The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors...
Um, wha? The thrusters on the Titan were electric and (I assume) powered by batteries. Unless they were referring to oily farts or they had taken certain foods or a can of oil, where would they come from?
'Voters prefer the Tory party of today to its predecessors – but all voters prefer the Labour Party of Tony Blair to that of Starmer or Corbyn
26% of voters preferred the Conservative Party of today, 25% preferred the party of Thatcher, and 16% chose the party of Cameron. Among Tory voters, the figures were 50%, 26% and 18% respectively. For Labour, 32% of voters chose the party of Blair, 18% the party of today, and 16% the party of Corbyn. Among Labour voters, the figures were 39%, 30% and 22%.'
Obviously, young HY. It is only the Conservatives who prefer the party of Johnson and Thatcher who are still Conservatives. The rest have given up on them.
Put bluntly, pain is a feature not a bug of tackling inflation: the whole point of hiking interest rates is, as Jeremy Hunt’s economic adviser Karen Ward put it, to “create uncertainty and frailty”, squeezing consumers until they spend less and making employers clamp down on wages. If it isn’t hurting, as John Major famously said when rates hit 15% in the 1980s, it isn’t working. But what if it’s hurting all right, and still not working? That’s the prospect now haunting Rishi Sunak, with core inflation – what’s left when volatile food and energy prices are stripped out – still stubbornly rising in a way that suggests this is more than just a post-pandemic blip.
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. TWhen again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
We have a suddenly shrunken workforce because of Covid, not Brexit, so basic fail right there
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
No it's not. I know from my own in employer that many left because of Covid but didn't bother returning because Brexit made it too much of an arse ache. Had it not been for Brexit we'd have been back to normal in a jiffy.
"in a jifty"
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Have they thought about replacing the bargirls with barmen? Or even immigrants? Might be an avenue to explore?
Well, yes and no. Few people migrate - especially at great expense in time and money - to become waitpersons
Whole generations of Aussies used to come over to work in bars for a year before heading home. (The old "working holiday" visa.)
...The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors...
Um, wha? The thrusters on the Titan were electric and (I assume) powered by batteries. Unless they were referring to oily farts or they had taken certain foods or a can of oil, where would they come from?
Also, the maths doesn't really make sense. If the hull was collapsing at 2200 ft/sec (not that it would collapse at a constant speed), then it would collapse by 2.2 feet in 1 ms, which is a lot, but not yet complete collapse. Though I get the point that the resulting compression would cause an explosion, as in a diesel engine.
...The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors...
Um, wha? The thrusters on the Titan were electric and (I assume) powered by batteries. Unless they were referring to oily farts or they had taken certain foods or a can of oil, where would they come from?
Also, the maths doesn't really make sense. If the hull was collapsing at 2200 ft/sec (not that it would collapse at a constant speed), then it would collapse by 2.2 feet in 1 ms, which is a lot, but not yet complete collapse. Though I get the point that the resulting compression would cause an explosion, as in a diesel engine.
1 or 10ms, the point is it is a lot quicker than human perception.
...The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors...
Um, wha? The thrusters on the Titan were electric and (I assume) powered by batteries. Unless they were referring to oily farts or they had taken certain foods or a can of oil, where would they come from?
Also, the maths doesn't really make sense. If the hull was collapsing at 2200 ft/sec (not that it would collapse at a constant speed), then it would collapse by 2.2 feet in 1 ms, which is a lot, but not yet complete collapse. Though I get the point that the resulting compression would cause an explosion, as in a diesel engine.
Yes, plus 2.2 ft is about the same as 1-2 microwaves. You compress five people plus various onboard stuff down to that size in a moment, you end up with a hot red puree. They never knew what was happening.
Question Time from Clacton on BBC now, a 100% Leave voters audience examining their views of Brexit. John Redwood and Alistair Campbell in the audience
Anybody got a bomb to drop on the studio? It would increase the country’s IQ by 10% if you could get rid of some Brexiteers - especially Essex Brexiteers.
What a repulsive comment? And you wonder why 52% voted Leave when you have such contempt for them!
52% wouldn't vote leave now they know the consequences and mess Brexiteer politicians make of things. It'd be a remain landslide. Even rejoin, with all its complexities, would stand a pretty good chance given what a disaster Brexit has been for everyone except pensioners and the super rich.
The problem for the Tories is not just mortgage holders but renters as well.
Rents are high, the quality of properties is poor and renters are treated badly by a lot of landlords. That is a very real issue for the young who cannot buy.
It's not just building properties for sale that is needed but a decent rental sector as well.
It is a vicious circle as buy to let landlords either sell up reducing supply or increase rents in line with their mortgage costs
Even at 300,000 homes a year it will take years when the crisis is now
Starmer is going to have a tough few years as interest rates are heading up towards 6% with no easing before 2025
The Fed have said tonight the US will also need further interest rate increases this year
I wonder what will happen when there are (a) not enough renters left able to afford the excruciating sums being demanded by desperate landlords, and (b) not enough buyers left able to afford the prices that failed landlords demand when attempting to sell?
Then there's all the mortgage borrowers collapsing under the weight of hugely inflated repayments. The entire property market could easily crash land, and you have to wonder how much capacity the banks have to intervene to prop bad debtors up, even if being cajoled, threatened and begged by the politicians to do so. IANAE but surely if the lenders try to support too many distressed borrowers at once then we end up back in another banking crisis?
Indeed, the GFC was caused by mortgages going bad, with the property not worth the debt. It could very easily happen again.
That was the trigger not the cause. The cause was the misallocation of systemic risk
Reassuring this evening that the midsummer swallows are still looping overhead. And there are insects. If government wants a Brexit benefit then ban most insecticides and create maritime reserves around most of the coast.
I always find it a little sad that before we even reach the longest day most of the cuckoos are already on their way back across France to Africa. Such an iconic bird and yet it is here for such a short time. Just 8 weeks out of each year.
A truly shit lifestyle, though, iconic or not.
I have just been in the Shiants surrounded by puffins.
Did you actually land?!
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
Mate of mine (ex war correspondent I got to know in the line of duty as it were) owns Taransay if you want a change from your usual luxury travel pieces
Seems to me that the children of homeowners in their last days, who benefited from huge price rises and could afford to have their deposits financed, before they were left yet another hugely valuable house, are potentially forming a new social caste. With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit. People have a tendency to marry within caste too. I don't like the implications of that.
Inheritance tax needs to be larger, and have no allowance for anyone other than a spouse/partner, or some dependents in particular circumstances. In fact have a maximum inheritance too, with a 100% rate above that.
Why does the state have the right to confiscate someone’s savings (on which they have already paid tax) just because they are unfortunate enough to die?
It reverses the relationship between the individual and the state
Reassuring this evening that the midsummer swallows are still looping overhead. And there are insects. If government wants a Brexit benefit then ban most insecticides and create maritime reserves around most of the coast.
I always find it a little sad that before we even reach the longest day most of the cuckoos are already on their way back across France to Africa. Such an iconic bird and yet it is here for such a short time. Just 8 weeks out of each year.
A truly shit lifestyle, though, iconic or not.
I have just been in the Shiants surrounded by puffins.
Did you actually land?!
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
Mate of mine (ex war correspondent I got to know in the line of duty as it were) owns Taransay if you want a change from your usual luxury travel pieces
I assume that's the Harris Taransay (of Castaway fame)? Nice.
Shame about the crappy campsite opposite at Horgabost, though. Some idiot was razzing up and down the beach in a 4x4 when I was last there (at 11pm, naturally).
Much preferred it when it was just a few dunes and one small chod (allegedly by appointment to HM).
Comments
I am no fan of LAB or Starmer. I don't think many people are. But so many people - including as evidenced on here - think that this government is UTTER SHYTE and has no idea what they are doing.
So I think LAB could well be on for it although I think they are unlikely to get beyond 350.
https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/nuclear-power-ukraine-what-would-happen-if-zaporizhzhia-was-hit#:~:text=What if a nuclear weapon were used?&text=At Zaporizhzhia, the large amounts,site and city of Enerhodar
https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1671987135413473282
But, that doesn't mean it will stay that way. If it doesn't, I expect long-held positions will rapidly reverse with some fascinating logical contortions along the way.
Time-wise, say a week or so without pushing it (that is yourself) too much.
Decades ago did road trip
> 1st day = Seattle via Kamloops (bypassing Vancouver) and CN Glacier NP to Banff (took longer because I took old TCH via Fraser canyon instead of the freeway).
> 2nd day = Banff via Calgary to US Glacier-CN Waterton Lakes NPs to Crowsnest Pass
> 3rd day = Crowsnest Pass via BC highway north of border (in some case less than 10th of mile) to Vancouver
> 4th day = Van to Sea.
I'm jealous if so. Only ever seen them from a ferry across the Minch
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room, about his weird "ownership" of the Shiants, is excellent
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Room-Island-Adam-Nicolson/dp/0006532012
As I pointed out recently, when you have an economy that's stagnant - and the UK has been in more-or-less that position for about the last fifteen years, given that wages are at something like 2008 levels in real terms and our anaemic economic growth has now ceased altogether - then prosperity becomes a zero-sum game. The aspirations of one group of people within society to a better standard of living can only be achieved through the immiseration of another. That's effectively what we've been seeing throughout the entire term of Conservative-led administration since 2010, with wealthy older homeowners and rentiers going up in the world and much of the rest of the population going down (courtesy of asset price inflation and many years of austerity, from which pensioners alone enjoyed some measure of state protection.)
A housing market collapse would simply unwind a lot of those gains - reducing substantially, for example, the current fraction of pensioner households (about 25%) that hold assets in excess of £1m, and wiping out a lot of landlords - whilst releasing discounted properties onto the market (through repossessions and fire sales) for previously priced-out workers on modest incomes. And yes, it'll cause a lot of collateral damage and gravely hurt many innocent, unlucky but heavily leveraged existing borrowers into the bargain. But that's the price that society, collectively, has to pay for the gross mismanagement of the entire economy stretching right the way back to the 1980s. The mass sell-off of heavily discounted council properties to what are now today's septuagenarians, without either replenishing the stock of homes available to rent affordably, or building enough new homes for sale to accommodate a growing population, was and remains modern Britain's original sin, and is at the root of pretty well everything that's gone wrong since.
I am also aware, despite your side’s oppression fantasies, that we were a large and influential member and had the ability to change the EU - as we did by creating the Single Market and driving the accession of the eastern states over French objections. We have, and hopefully will again, drive the direction of the EU to fix its many many flaws.
Pretending we were simultaneously superior and subservient to a mythical “superstate”, as you did and do, has proved to be an obvious falsehood. Brexit has damaged everyone in Europe - just us more than everyone else.
Twit
Yes 25% will need care costs like your son in law's parents, 75% won't however
Maybe it’s not working yet because the Bank of England initially moved too slowly, as the government is increasingly openly hinting. Or maybe it’s because so many baby boomers have already paid off their mortgages and so few under-35s can actually get one, meaning interest rate rises don’t have the dramatic impact they once did. Then again, perhaps the reason conventional economic medicine seems to be working in the US and Europe but not in Britain may have something to do with the suddenly shrunken workforce and extra costs of doing business that accompanied Brexit. Who could have guessed that shooting yourself in the foot would actually hurt?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/22/interest-rates-poorer-rishi-sunak-britain-economic
> Glacier National Park, Canada (British Columbia) pronounced "GLASS-ee-er"
> Glacier National Park, United States (Montana) pronounced "GLAY-sher"
AND when you order a (fountain) soft drink
> in United States 99.46% of time, served with ice in glass
> in Canada 99.46% of time, served without ice
Don't delay planting the asparagus crowns - they take a few years to get established but once they are settled in they are very rewarding.
About a million people or more over 50, self employed, etc, decided Fuck it, and left the economy
This is pure drivel
Do read the book (if you haven't already)
Hindsight, but we didn't make enough of a fuss. And if the rumours about tentative Ukrainian breakthroughs are true...
Am thinking.
City 4-6. (Combine that with one other and I'm in profit).
Leicester 6-1
Bolton 8-1
Notts County 10-1 (Wrexham are ridiculously short).
Haven't thrown a big wild card outsider this year.
What do others think?
Would appreciate any reasonably specialist info @foxy and others. Don't know if our Forest fans know much about County?
15% of Leave voters want to rejoin.
But
Just eyeballing that poll from the tweet, something like 12% of Remain voters do not even want to rejoin the Single market.
Indeed only 75% of Remain voters want to now rejoin the EU.
So you have won 15% of Leave voters but lost 25% of Remain voters. Indeed only around 45% of those polled (in the poll you are quoting) actually want to rejoin the EU in the next 10-15 years.
If you are going to trumpet a poll as game changing, best look at the whole poll not just the bit you agree with.
The 1970s were a mess but the leaders of the 1970s aren't responsible for the paucity and lack of affordability of housing today. More homes were completed in 1979 than in any year since, even though the population of the country has grown by about 20% between then and now.
Is it just possible that, for all the good she may have done in some areas, Mrs Thatcher (and all of her successors of both parties, who have effectively embraced her model of low volume, mainly private sector housebuilding and resultant runaway property price inflation) might just have screwed up in this crucial respect? Do you not comprehend all of the problems that are created by an inadequate supply of hugely overpriced homes, for anyone save a minority of very lucky owner-occupiers?
However it is not nonsense that Brexit will get the blame for everything for somt time, just as the EU got the blame for years. That is human psychology. Not much to be done. Just hope we move on, soon or eventually
Only 25% of that 600k were seeking work visas.
It might well be working now if everyone was on SVR, but they're not so, we can't tell yet because the hurt will only come in the step changes when large numbers of people roll off one fixed term deal onto another at a much higher rate.
Rather than boiling the frog slowly, we're amputating it a limb at at a time - or something?
With interests entirely opposite to those who didn't benefit.
People have a tendency to marry within caste too.
I don't like the implications of that.
The desire to blame FATCHA is simply embarrassing. It is adolescent. There are multiple reasons for this situation. One of them is, without question, that Thatcher made London successful again. She deregulated the City, tamed the unions, created Canary Wharf - under her watch London's declining population (shrinking since 1939) bottomed out, then started growing again (I believe the nadir was 86-87). People are attracted to successful cities, so they came to London, under Thatcher, Now London is as big as it has ever been, partly because New Labour opened the migration floodgates to Eastern Europe. A Labour choice
Outside London and the SE houses are largely affordable. I have young relatives who can buy on fairly average salaries, no problem
Your simplistic economic gibberish does not work on a sophisticated site like PB.com. Go away and try again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Highway_3
I've no doubt that people are unhappy with Brexit, by the idea that there is any sort of clear mandate for rejoining the EU as it is — this is key, the real EU, not some fantasy version that never existed — has not been borne out in any detailed polling to the best of my knowledge. Sadly few organisations seem to be willing to do such polling, probably because it's not cheap.
* We would never have even had a referendum if the EU was willing to make such changes. Not that there would have been any point, the UK public would overwhelmingly back an à la carte EU.
lol
That is about your level of analysis
I've just been in the USA where the hospitality industry is suffering an intense lack of workers - still - due to Covid. Hotels without receptionists, restaurants without waiters, bars without bargirls, parks without guides. It is everywhere. America did not Brexit, but it did go through Covid. And Covid fucked up the flow of low-paying unskilled work, throughout the rich world
Currently outside of some EU countries unemployment rates are very low
The Cognitive Elite, he called it, tho he probably put too much emphasis on Cognitive and not enough on Elite
Might be an avenue to explore?
I usually do it in the week before the first games (the odds will change to reflect of course).
That's pretty much my thinking. Thought 6 was a bit generous at this stage. They are clearly ahead just now.
It's mostly a bit of fun, so that I can support a team for the season in each league.
Many thanks.
I like the way they’ve adopted the LLG grouping too. Dutch salute.
Here we are.
We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents for a TA are a statutory obligation, enforceable by Law.
Yet we continue to advertise at minimum wage. When Aldi are paying a quid more an hour. And offering all the same term time working.
At some stage (probably next year) it falls apart.
It's either more immigration or a huge pay rise. I favour the latter, but then the bedwetters object to paying more tax, and inflation, and interest rates
It's a Gordian knot.
One is to pay more for the services we currently use.
The other is to accept that we're going to have worse services.
It would be lovely to get more for less... But it's not happening and I don't think it is possible.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1487009/He-is-capable-of-awful-cruelty.-He-is-a-Vulcan-not-a-human-being.html
Here we are.
We can't get TA's for September. And children with ECHP documents are a statutory obligation Issue is.
Statutory services are simply not being provided. Because no one will work for the money offered.
At some stage the compensation through the courts will outweigh the relatively measly pay rises to compete with Lidl.
But perhaps we should look at the binary question, in/out, we are discussing, a question conveniently answered in the same paper the previous poll was taken from -
https://www.institute.global/insights/geopolitics-and-security/moving-forward-path-to-better-post-brexit-relationship-between-uk-eu
Scroll down to figure 3, voting intention in a hypothetical in/out referendum today, you’ll see that 71% of leavers would vote to stay out compared to 84% of remainers who would vote to rejoin. That means that remain has hung onto significantly more of its 2016 voters than leave has done which, given the clusterfuck the whole thing has been, is hardly surprising.
I don't think the government wants to do either of those.
23.14 BST
The Wall Street Journal reports that a “top secret US navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission”.
Guardian live blog.
As I have said on here regularly before, much of the antipathy towards Brexit currently is a substitute for animosity towards the Tories who have performed so badly in the years since. Once they are gone and we have a vaguely competant (or at least not so obviously corrupt) Government again I suspect Brexit will cease to be the toxic subject it is at the moment. Not least because I expect Starner to have a transfomative attitude to his relationship with the EU.
Also worth remembering that there are plenty of people out there who would be happy with the EFTA/EEA option going forward including many Brexit voters. (Your annual reminder that I did a PB thread header on this very subject the day after the vote in 2016.)
The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns.
Having said that, it's hardly a secret that the US, and no doubt other countries, have very sensitive detection systems in place in the North Atlantic.
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second.
The time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors.
When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine.
The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
Info Source: Dave Corley, former Nuke sub officer
https://twitter.com/olilondontv/status/1671951053753909255
Right now we are at peak rejoin (at least until a few months after the next election). From that point on Rejoin is screwed.
26% of voters preferred the Conservative Party of today, 25% preferred the party of Thatcher, and 16% chose the party of Cameron. Among Tory voters, the figures were 50%, 26% and 18% respectively.
For Labour, 32% of voters chose the party of Blair, 18% the party of today, and 16% the party of Corbyn. Among Labour voters, the figures were 39%, 30% and 22%.'
https://cps.org.uk/research/britain-speaks-the-new-language-of-politics-and-business/
But do take whatever comfort you can.
It reverses the relationship between the individual and the state
https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer/status/1671991860573933568
Shame about the crappy campsite opposite at Horgabost, though. Some idiot was razzing up and down the beach in a 4x4 when I was last there (at 11pm, naturally).
Much preferred it when it was just a few dunes and one small chod (allegedly by appointment to HM).