Boris Johnson and particularly Team Farage perpetuated lies to ensure "leave" prevailed at the EURef.
Edit. Although in Johnson's case he didn't realise his lies would take it over the line. The last thing he wanted. But it got him into Downing Street, so what the Hell?
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
The greatest uptick in house prices was about 2000 - 2007, and the greatest non-financial driver in living memory was the leap in immigration over about the same period. Tories suck but I don't see how they are more blameworthy than nulab on this particular issue.
Because after prices were stable-ish from 2009/10 to 2012/13 George Osborne created Help To Buy and the whole thing took off again.
Let's try to understand the difference between "equally" and "more".
Doing a stupid thing for the first time is stupid Doing a stupid thing for the second time is more stupid
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
We know that for Gove, there was an element of it that was personal (his father's fish business and all that- whatever the reality, it was the story Gove seems to have told himself). Stanley Johnson was an MEP for a while; has anyone tried to link that to Johnson's euroscepticism?
And even if Boris wasn't responsible for Brexit, it's likely that he gets the blame in the history books. Much easier to blame a hasbeen when the country decides to move on, whatever form that takes. And Boris always wanted to go down in history.
He is certainly going to do that. He might not like what the historians say though.
Tough. There are loads of stories of people being granted their wish and regretting it because they don't get their wish in the way they imagined.
If Boris had been paying attention during his classics degree, he might have heard of some of them.
In my anecdote of one, my New York based company appears to get *more*, not *fewer* holidays than I did in Britain.
But there’s a different pattern. And overall, I can well believe that Americans work 16% longer overall.
I think that's highly atypical. Americans get a raw deal when it comes to bank holidays and annual leave.
Not so much these days
New Years Day Presidents Day MLK Easter Memorial Day Juneteenth Independence Day Labor Day Veterans Day Thanksgiving Christmas
Wiki has 11 vs UK of 8-10
Thanks for doing this comparison. Not only this, but some holidays do not fall on a Monday and so there is a culture of “making the bridge” as well, whereas a majority of British bank holidays are statutorily designed to keep on a Monday.
Americans are less likely to take long holidays (2 weeks is slightly decadent) but between the above, and a general tendency to take the entire summer slowly, I’m convinced Americans have *more* time off than Brits.
I’m exchange, they work longer/harder on the days they’re supposed to be at work.
Again, anecdote of 1.
While that list may be accurate for federal employees, is it true for everyone else?
Brexit is estimated to have cost 5.5% of GDP so far (some think it a bit lower, some higher).
That really is a fuck-ton when you think about the state of the country’s finances and you wonder why Britain doesn’t seem to be able to afford anything anymore.
Re-entry into the Single Market, seems inevitable.
The problem is that Britain is now a significant rule-taker, and nothing short of Rejoin really fixes that. Brexit has resulted in an astonishing loss of meaningful sovereignty.
Hahahaha.
You are deluded if you think being a member of the EU made us anything other than a rule taker anyway. That is the whole point of QMV. We don't get to choose.
I accept your Brexit. You said it might be s*** but your perceived return of sovereignty is fair enough a reason to encourage a leave vote. I don't agree, but it is a good enough justification for me.
The ones that get my goat are those lying toerags like Johnson who sold Brexit as being an economic opportunity.
What annoys me most about that is that it actually didn't (and doesn't) have to be that way. Yes there was always going to be a hit on the economy - all change is disruptive but that is not a good enough argument not to change. But May and Johnson chose the very worst forms of change whilst smiling and telling us it was all fine.
It hasn't changed my view of Brexit one iota. Funnily enough it hasn't really changed my view of Johnson or May either. I always knew they were shits and one or two extra data points confirming that view doesn't change anything.
You are one of the few Brexiteers who has acknowledged at least in the medium term there would be pain.
Johnson and his chums claimed it would be pain free, land of milk and honey stuff, and they put their b******* on the side of a bus.
Thing is, if the Leave campaign had put forward Richard's preferred version of Brexit then Remain would have won by about twenty points. To get the WWC voters in Stoke and Hartlepool to bother turning at the polling stations you needed to say we could have all the benefits of the single market without FoM.
And yet, perhaps Richard’s version of Brexit might actually
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It’s not just “standard of living” it’s quality of life
Yeah great you earn $120k a year but you have to drive everywhere, everyone is obese, your local downtown is a car lot, the local suburb is full of dangerous tranq addicts, you get one week holiday a year, the food is execrable, the landscapes are often dull, you have to fly ten hours to get anywhere that isn’t America and your kids have a 17% chance of being shot dead in kindergarten
I am thinking of a couple of holidays to the USA. You're not selling it to me
I’m clearly trolling. But who would choose to be born in America, now? It is no longer the shining city on the hill
The people banging on the door in Mexico now are very poor, from LatAm, Haiti, Africa. Very few East Asians, Europeans, Australians now go to America just coz it is America. They go for a top university place, or a great job offer, that’s it
So where is THE place to be born, these days? The answer is not clear at all
Norway, if you can tolerate the weather.
Very strict alcohol laws and still very socially conservative/authoritarian in some ways.
Remember (although admittedly it is now 40 years ago) Sweden advertised 'The Life of Brian' under the headline 'So funny they banned it in Norway'. And the Swedish telecoms minister nearly caused a diplomatic incident by referring to Norway as 'the last fucking communist country in the world' after a series of frustrating meetings about setting up the Scandinavian telecoms system.
Great anecdotes- I’d never heard those.
My views are coloured by spending my honeymoon there, but I couldn’t get over the fact that there were no chain stores of any real description outside Oslo, you’d turn up in a small town to find only one restaurant that served exquisite food, and wild camping was positively encouraged.
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
Perhaps it’s the place that has done communism properly?
ETA: sorry for messing up blockquotes!
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
And yet PB’s very own Alan bloody Whicker doesn’t rate Norway. How odd.
Here's an article for those wondering about who would want to be born in the United States. A better way to put that is: Who woud want to give birth in the United States?
And the answer is certainly thousands, probably tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands: "There are no statistics about the 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year.[4] The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, estimated in 2012 that there were approximately 40,000 annual births to parents in the United States as birth tourists.[5][6] The center also estimated in 2012 that total births to temporary immigrants in the United States (e.g., tourists, students, guest workers) could be as high as 200,000.[7][unreliable source?]
Russian birth tourism to Florida to 'maternity hotels' in the 2010s is documented.[3][8][9] Birth tourism packages complete with lodging and medical care delivered in Russian begin at $20,000, and go as high as $84,700 for an apartment in Miami's Trump Tower II complete with a "gold-tiled bathtub and chauffeured Cadillac Escalade."[9]
One option for mainland Chinese mothers to give birth is Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, where the cost is cheaper and travel does not require a U.S. visa.[10] More than 70% of the newborns in Saipan have birth tourist PRC parents who take advantage of the 45-day visa-free visitation rules of the territory and the Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands to ensure that their children can have American citizenship. There were 282 of these births in 2012.[11] At least one airline in Hong Kong requests that women who are "observed to have a body size or shape resembling a pregnant woman" submit to a pregnancy test before they are allowed to fly to Saipan.[12]
As of 2015, Los Angeles is considered a center of the maternity tourism industry, which caters mostly to Asian women from China and Taiwan;[13] authorities in the city there closed 14 maternity tourism "hotels" in 2013.[14] The industry is difficult to close down since it is not illegal for a pregnant woman to travel to the U.S.[14]" source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_tourism
As you can see, that article is somewhat dated. But I think it likely that the US has more "birth tourists" than any other nation. (From time to time I have seen articles saying that thousands of South Korean women alone came here to give birth each year.)
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
We know that for Gove, there was an element of it that was personal (his father's fish business and all that- whatever the reality, it was the story Gove seems to have told himself). Stanley Johnson was an MEP for a while; has anyone tried to link that to Johnson's euroscepticism?
And even if Boris wasn't responsible for Brexit, it's likely that he gets the blame in the history books. Much easier to blame a hasbeen when the country decides to move on, whatever form that takes. And Boris always wanted to go down in history.
Mr J certainly wanted the credit, I think it's fair to say.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
The greatest uptick in house prices was about 2000 - 2007, and the greatest non-financial driver in living memory was the leap in immigration over about the same period. Tories suck but I don't see how they are more blameworthy than nulab on this particular issue.
Because after prices were stable-ish from 2009/10 to 2012/13 George Osborne created Help To Buy and the whole thing took off again.
Let's try to understand the difference between "equally" and "more".
Doing a stupid thing for the first time is stupid Doing a stupid thing for the second time is more stupid
You think 2000-8 was the first ever UK housing boom? Really?
Brexit is estimated to have cost 5.5% of GDP so far (some think it a bit lower, some higher).
That really is a fuck-ton when you think about the state of the country’s finances and you wonder why Britain doesn’t seem to be able to afford anything anymore.
Re-entry into the Single Market, seems inevitable.
The problem is that Britain is now a significant rule-taker, and nothing short of Rejoin really fixes that. Brexit has resulted in an astonishing loss of meaningful sovereignty.
Hahahaha.
You are deluded if you think being a member of the EU made us anything other than a rule taker anyway. That is the whole point of QMV. We don't get to choose.
I accept your Brexit. You said it might be s*** but your perceived return of sovereignty is fair enough a reason to encourage a leave vote. I don't agree, but it is a good enough justification for me.
The ones that get my goat are those lying toerags like Johnson who sold Brexit as being an economic opportunity.
What annoys me most about that is that it actually didn't (and doesn't) have to be that way. Yes there was always going to be a hit on the economy - all change is disruptive but that is not a good enough argument not to change. But May and Johnson chose the very worst forms of change whilst smiling and telling us it was all fine.
It hasn't changed my view of Brexit one iota. Funnily enough it hasn't really changed my view of Johnson or May either. I always knew they were shits and one or two extra data points confirming that view doesn't change anything.
You are one of the few Brexiteers who has acknowledged at least in the medium term there would be pain.
Johnson and his chums claimed it would be pain free, land of milk and honey stuff, and they put their b******* on the side of a bus.
Thing is, if the Leave campaign had put forward Richard's preferred version of Brexit then Remain would have won by about twenty points. To get the WWC voters in Stoke and Hartlepool to bother turning at the polling stations you needed to say we could have all the benefits of the single market without FoM.
And yet, perhaps Richard’s version of Brexit might actually
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It’s not just “standard of living” it’s quality of life
Yeah great you earn $120k a year but you have to drive everywhere, everyone is obese, your local downtown is a car lot, the local suburb is full of dangerous tranq addicts, you get one week holiday a year, the food is execrable, the landscapes are often dull, you have to fly ten hours to get anywhere that isn’t America and your kids have a 17% chance of being shot dead in kindergarten
I am thinking of a couple of holidays to the USA. You're not selling it to me
I’m clearly trolling. But who would choose to be born in America, now? It is no longer the shining city on the hill
The people banging on the door in Mexico now are very poor, from LatAm, Haiti, Africa. Very few East Asians, Europeans, Australians now go to America just coz it is America. They go for a top university place, or a great job offer, that’s it
So where is THE place to be born, these days? The answer is not clear at all
Norway, if you can tolerate the weather.
Very strict alcohol laws and still very socially conservative/authoritarian in some ways.
Remember (although admittedly it is now 40 years ago) Sweden advertised 'The Life of Brian' under the headline 'So funny they banned it in Norway'. And the Swedish telecoms minister nearly caused a diplomatic incident by referring to Norway as 'the last fucking communist country in the world' after a series of frustrating meetings about setting up the Scandinavian telecoms system.
Great anecdotes- I’d never heard those.
My views are coloured by spending my honeymoon there, but I couldn’t get over the fact that there were no chain stores of any real description outside Oslo, you’d turn up in a small town to find only one restaurant that served exquisite food, and wild camping was positively encouraged.
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
Perhaps it’s the place that has done communism properly?
ETA: sorry for messing up blockquotes!
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
And yet PB’s very own Alan bloody Whicker doesn’t rate Norway. How odd.
I like the sound of it more and more. The locals don't think that good weather equates with a UV disaster and feeling as sweaty as a sumo wrestler's jockstrap, and they don't like bullshit. Must look into a Norwegian holiday (in part to see the stave churches).
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Nimbys can get fucked.
I thought you'd moved to Switzerland? What are they like there?
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Nimbys can get fucked.
I thought you'd moved to Switzerland? What are they like there?
Nah, my wife didn't want to live near her mother in the end so we didn't go.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Nimbys can get fucked.
I thought you'd moved to Switzerland? What are they like there?
Nah, my wife didn't want to live near her mother in the end so we didn't go.
Thanks. Would be interesting to see how they do things.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Nimbys can get fucked.
But. Then who decides the qualifying criteria?
The government, not the local council.
And who elects them? Don't get me wrong, I am in agreement with your aims. But, until we have a society which doesn't fear the young we won't get far.
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Older people also tend to be more involved in community activities from the church to Rotary clubs and NADFAS. There is also usually a youth football club locally as much as a bowls club. In my experience even many middle aged people want bank branches open and also are anti building on the greenbelt.
It was the Covid lockdowns which damaged nightclubs profits more than anything
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Brexit is estimated to have cost 5.5% of GDP so far (some think it a bit lower, some higher).
That really is a fuck-ton when you think about the state of the country’s finances and you wonder why Britain doesn’t seem to be able to afford anything anymore.
Re-entry into the Single Market, seems inevitable.
The problem is that Britain is now a significant rule-taker, and nothing short of Rejoin really fixes that. Brexit has resulted in an astonishing loss of meaningful sovereignty.
Hahahaha.
You are deluded if you think being a member of the EU made us anything other than a rule taker anyway. That is the whole point of QMV. We don't get to choose.
I accept your Brexit. You said it might be s*** but your perceived return of sovereignty is fair enough a reason to encourage a leave vote. I don't agree, but it is a good enough justification for me.
The ones that get my goat are those lying toerags like Johnson who sold Brexit as being an economic opportunity.
What annoys me most about that is that it actually didn't (and doesn't) have to be that way. Yes there was always going to be a hit on the economy - all change is disruptive but that is not a good enough argument not to change. But May and Johnson chose the very worst forms of change whilst smiling and telling us it was all fine.
It hasn't changed my view of Brexit one iota. Funnily enough it hasn't really changed my view of Johnson or May either. I always knew they were shits and one or two extra data points confirming that view doesn't change anything.
You are one of the few Brexiteers who has acknowledged at least in the medium term there would be pain.
Johnson and his chums claimed it would be pain free, land of milk and honey stuff, and they put their b******* on the side of a bus.
Thing is, if the Leave campaign had put forward Richard's preferred version of Brexit then Remain would have won by about twenty points. To get the WWC voters in Stoke and Hartlepool to bother turning at the polling stations you needed to say we could have all the benefits of the single market without FoM.
And yet, perhaps Richard’s version of Brexit might actually
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It’s not just “standard of living” it’s quality of life
Yeah great you earn $120k a year but you have to drive everywhere, everyone is obese, your local downtown is a car lot, the local suburb is full of dangerous tranq addicts, you get one week holiday a year, the food is execrable, the landscapes are often dull, you have to fly ten hours to get anywhere that isn’t America and your kids have a 17% chance of being shot dead in kindergarten
I am thinking of a couple of holidays to the USA. You're not selling it to me
I’m clearly trolling. But who would choose to be born in America, now? It is no longer the shining city on the hill
The people banging on the door in Mexico now are very poor, from LatAm, Haiti, Africa. Very few East Asians, Europeans, Australians now go to America just coz it is America. They go for a top university place, or a great job offer, that’s it
So where is THE place to be born, these days? The answer is not clear at all
Norway, if you can tolerate the weather.
Very strict alcohol laws and still very socially conservative/authoritarian in some ways.
Remember (although admittedly it is now 40 years ago) Sweden advertised 'The Life of Brian' under the headline 'So funny they banned it in Norway'. And the Swedish telecoms minister nearly caused a diplomatic incident by referring to Norway as 'the last fucking communist country in the world' after a series of frustrating meetings about setting up the Scandinavian telecoms system.
Great anecdotes- I’d never heard those.
My views are coloured by spending my honeymoon there, but I couldn’t get over the fact that there were no chain stores of any real description outside Oslo, you’d turn up in a small town to find only one restaurant that served exquisite food, and wild camping was positively encouraged.
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
Perhaps it’s the place that has done communism properly?
ETA: sorry for messing up blockquotes!
There was also a very healthy distaste of braggadocio and narcissism amongst the Norwegians I got to know.
And yet PB’s very own Alan bloody Whicker doesn’t rate Norway. How odd.
I like the sound of it more and more. The locals don't think that good weather equates with a UV disaster and feeling as sweaty as a sumo wrestler's jockstrap, and they don't like bullshit. Must look into a Norwegian holiday (in part to see the stave churches).
They like their sunshine, and there's plenty of it. Facebook has just reminded me that 4 years ago I was swimming in the sea at 68N. Wasn't that cold.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
The greatest uptick in house prices was about 2000 - 2007, and the greatest non-financial driver in living memory was the leap in immigration over about the same period. Tories suck but I don't see how they are more blameworthy than nulab on this particular issue.
Because after prices were stable-ish from 2009/10 to 2012/13 George Osborne created Help To Buy and the whole thing took off again.
Let's try to understand the difference between "equally" and "more".
Doing a stupid thing for the first time is stupid Doing a stupid thing for the second time is more stupid
You think 2000-8 was the first ever UK housing boom? Really?
No. I think there were other booms before that. So let me modify my answer.
Doing a stupid thing for the nth time is stupid Doing a stupid thing for the n+1th time is more stupid
I think what I'd love for any new government to do in 2025 after the election is investigate all of the anti growth regulation and legislation the country has in place that other countries don't bother with. Stuff like ULEZ, which though I personally favour, is undoubtedly a drag on growth, a lot of the agricultural regulation is a huge drag on growth (pro-badger policies that other countries laugh at) in our farming sector, lack of competition in key sectors and a swathe of planning regulations and eliminating council control over any project that drives continual positive GDP.
Why is ULEZ a drag on growth? It encourages additional spending and transactions in the auto retail sector, and it will lead to improved health outcomes and thus higher productivity. The biggest drags on growth right now come from inadequate government spending on health and education, which is leaving people too ill and too poorly-educated to be as productive as they could be. And too little spending on infrastructure that could unlock new housing development (eg in my neck of the woods, failure to fund the Bakerloo Line extension that could allow for loads of new housing down the Old Kent Road). At the moment it feels like the government has a deliberate policy to impoverish us.
It prevents some number of people driving in outer London and we're a net importer of vehicles so we're not going to benefit as a country from new vehicle sales outside of the sales chain, most of the value chain exists outside of the UK, especially for cars being bought in wealthy outer London suburbs.
My biggest issue, however, isn't ULEZ, which as I said I do support because I live in London and the summer air quality is atrocious. The biggest issue is local planning and local councils. They are the biggest barrier to growth in the country, they seem to exist to snuff out all enterprise in the nation a thousand paper cuts at a time.
In my experience local councils reflect the concerns of local Parties' memberships. Average age 55+. And local Council voters. Probably not much different. Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful. And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's. Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Which is why economic development decisions should be taken away from them, decisions should be made on automatic qualifying criteria and if those are met you go ahead, if not you don't.
Nimbys can get fucked.
But. Then who decides the qualifying criteria?
The government, not the local council.
And who elects them? Don't get me wrong, I am in agreement with your aims. But, until we have a society which doesn't fear the young we won't get far.
Very fit young blondes who can trace their ancestry back to Woden.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
We know that for Gove, there was an element of it that was personal (his father's fish business and all that- whatever the reality, it was the story Gove seems to have told himself). Stanley Johnson was an MEP for a while; has anyone tried to link that to Johnson's euroscepticism?
And even if Boris wasn't responsible for Brexit, it's likely that he gets the blame in the history books. Much easier to blame a hasbeen when the country decides to move on, whatever form that takes. And Boris always wanted to go down in history.
I think this another reason why I think Brexit will either be reversed or we'll end up with a version of it more akin to what Richard Tyndall wants. Johnson is going to be compared to PMs such as Chamberlain and Eden in the history books, and Millennials are not going to have fond memories of either him or the various cronies (Mogg, Dorries, Jenkyns, Frost) who enabled him. Brexit's association with his corruption and cronyism means Remainers/Rejoiners aren't going to change their minds and demographic change will see Rejoin's lead continually grow.
There are better statistics available on naturalization in the US, than on birth tourism. For example: "USCIS welcomed 967,500 new citizens in fiscal year 2022 during naturalization ceremonies held across the United States and around the world. This is a 20% increase from last year and the highest number of naturalizations seen since FY 2008." source: https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/naturalization-statistics
(Some of our politicians like to attend the naturalization ceremonies, especially the ones on July 4th.)
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
When pettifrogging is pretty much all you have, naturally it gets overdone. What's weird is Westminster and Whitehall have the actual power and yet also overemphasise pettifrogging.
In my anecdote of one, my New York based company appears to get *more*, not *fewer* holidays than I did in Britain.
But there’s a different pattern. And overall, I can well believe that Americans work 16% longer overall.
I think that's highly atypical. Americans get a raw deal when it comes to bank holidays and annual leave.
Not so much these days
New Years Day Presidents Day MLK Easter Memorial Day Juneteenth Independence Day Labor Day Veterans Day Thanksgiving Christmas
Wiki has 11 vs UK of 8-10
Thanks for doing this comparison. Not only this, but some holidays do not fall on a Monday and so there is a culture of “making the bridge” as well, whereas a majority of British bank holidays are statutorily designed to keep on a Monday.
Americans are less likely to take long holidays (2 weeks is slightly decadent) but between the above, and a general tendency to take the entire summer slowly, I’m convinced Americans have *more* time off than Brits.
I’m exchange, they work longer/harder on the days they’re supposed to be at work.
Again, anecdote of 1.
While that list may be accurate for federal employees, is it true for everyone else?
It’s true in my company.
As I said earlier, atypical.
Well I have an anecdote of 1, and you just have assertion.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
When pettifrogging is pretty much all you have, naturally it gets overdone. What's weird is Westminster and Whitehall have the actual power and yet also overemphasise pettifrogging.
Pettifogging.
Pettifrogging is presumably the very small braid detail in regimental jackets.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
When pettifrogging is pretty much all you have, naturally it gets overdone. What's weird is Westminster and Whitehall have the actual power and yet also overemphasise pettifrogging.
More seriously, Britain is an incredibly nanny-fied state. Brits don’t realise this, but it is.
Just got back from campaigning in Uxbridge today. Conservative vote holding up better than I expected, some waverers considering Labour but even most of them anti ULEZ. Labour also out in force and Rejoin EU at the station.
On national swing Labour should take it but anti ULEZ feeling could squeak a narrow Tory hold
Is ULEZ expansion such a big issue outside Nick Ferrari's head?
It is either a seismic event or wishful thinking by Tory activists.
the only people I know who are bothered about it would have voted tory anyway.
ULEZ was mentioned at every other door in Uxbridge today, including by undecideds
Did you lead with it though on the doorstep, or have you been highlighting it in your leaflets. By the way I am not saying you shouldn't. If it is a vote winner you should, but are you biasing the feedback?
It could work, although it could also be a reworking of the hopeless "save the pound" campaign of 2001. Lots of promise and no delivery.
Nobody thought there was a serious prospect of losing the pound. They do think there's a serious prospect of ULEZ being introduced, because there is.
But who does it negatively impact, in terms of numbers? What I am asking is how many voters have pre- Euro 6 diesels?
What you see in many areas of west London is a mix of people who’ve been living there since the year dot. Not especially wealthy, car is an old banger.
Next door you have wealthy incomers who bought when the area was so-so - house in a cheap area. Big rip out and redo on the house. Expensive hybrid or EV parked out front.
One thing to consider is the former group, even when their current car is compliant, expect the next step to happen soon. Reduce the emission levels, again, and take *their* car. They all know someone who had to sell their car outside London because of LEZ. They see it as pricing them off the road, in favour of the incomers with the money for a brand new car.
I live in outer London and only occasionally hear people even mention the Ulez-x. The vast majority of the whining I encounter is from the bumpkins on PB.
Most people I know are in favour.
It’s about groupings - the people you mix with are well off professionals? Those are the people whose cars are compliant because they are so new.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
So, no planning restrictions? Or, if not, who decides?
As I said, criteria for planning should be pass/fail and once all of them are passed in the application it gets approval. The rules can be set by central government so we get consistency.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
So, no planning restrictions? Or, if not, who decides?
As I said, criteria for planning should be pass/fail and once all of them are passed in the application it gets approval. The rules can be set by central government so we get consistency.
Which would be fine if we can make the criteria completely objective (hint: we can't - consider a requirement for a new building to be 'in keeping' in an historic neighbourhood).
There must also rightly be a degree of local situation influencing planning - who want's brick buildings begin built in the centre of Bath for example.
Having said that, HMG could legislate to make planning easier. At the moment our village is not a designated development village in Dorset so no new buildings can be built unless they are replacing an old one that is knocked down. As a consequence of course the village is slowly dying, frozen in time.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think. Gove has now reflected those views at central government level too
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think
Which is not their job, which is to judge applications against local and national planning policy (also, I don't know why you are bringing housing on the Green Belt into it, planning committees consider a lot more than matters in the Green Belt as you know).
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
It’s a shame that so many children can only get on the housing ladder with help from their parents. It would be so much better if house prices were lower and they could afford to buy a home with their own savings and income.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
Doesn't sound like our council. I cannot recall a time when a significant housing development was refused, though some have had conditions applied on landscaping and road access etc.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
It’s a shame that so many children can only get on the housing ladder with help from their parents. It would be so much better if house prices were lower and they could afford to buy a home with their own savings and income.
Great comment. It's nice many people get help, but shouldn't people who work full time, two people usually, be able to get on the ladder without significant help?
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think
Which is not their job, which is to judge applications against local and national planning policy (also, I don't know why you are bringing housing on the Green Belt into it, planning committees consider a lot more than matters in the Green Belt as you know).
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Of course planning decisions have to be in line with the local plan but increasingly councils offering lots of new greenbelt housing in their local plans, especially Tory ones, have been thrown out by local voters in favour of NIMBY LD, Green and Independent councils who adjust their local plans in a more NIMBY direction accordingly. After Chesham and Amersham Gove too has scrapped mandatory central government new housing targets too
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think. Gove has now reflected those views at central government level too
Although voters don't want more building on the green belt, they also don't want to get poorer. And it's beginning to look like the first is causing the second.
But @kle4 is right; council planning committees don't have that much discretion about individual planning applications. All the planning committee can really do is say whether application X is within the rules of the local plan or not. Those rules are often tightly, meanly drawn, but that's another matter. Hyped Local Campaigns against specific developments make a lot of noise (and win a lot of elections) but don't really change that many decisions from what would have happened anyway. Local plan designations are way more important for that.
But ultimately, electorates get the governments they deserve, because they get the governments they vote for. If we think that our governments are stupid, short-sighted and dishonest, well...
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
It’s a shame that so many children can only get on the housing ladder with help from their parents. It would be so much better if house prices were lower and they could afford to buy a home with their own savings and income.
North of Watford gap many can but I am in favour of inherited wealth and the family so have no problem with parental assistance for their childrens' deposits
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
But the reason the housing is so expensive is because there’s a shortage of the stuff relative to population growth.
So, again, we have an unearned transfer of wealth from those who don’t own property to those who do, or whose parent’s did, resulting in the latter having a massive incentive to constrain housing supply in order to line their own pockets. Something they are able to do now that they’ve abstracted all that wealth from those who would like to see more housing being built.
We should be building houses on Brownfield sites. But when one tries just that do that they come up with reasons against it. Like it's not a bus route. Or too far from a school.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
That's a misleading quote. If you read the article, it says:
"A staggering 64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder."
In other words, it's almost impossible for people to get onto the property ladder without the help of mum and dad. And most parents can't afford to gift little Johnny £32k.
It struck me that it was quite something that we accepted and thought "this is f**king brilliant" into our culture in way I think would have been more troublesome for the US or French, for instance. And also struck me that it was something that was profoundly un-brexiteer in the way it is commonly expressed by the likes of the Mail or Mogg.
Possibly I am also a bit tipsy and on holiday for two weeks, however,
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Honestly, you really should know better. This is a survey of 1,100 Zoopla users who, by definition, are people buying, or looking to buy, houses. It therefore doesn't include the millions who never look at Zoopla because they have no prospect of buying a house. So it's two-thirds of a small, atypical, self-selecting subsample.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think
Which is not their job, which is to judge applications against local and national planning policy (also, I don't know why you are bringing housing on the Green Belt into it, planning committees consider a lot more than matters in the Green Belt as you know).
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Of course planning decisions have to be in line with the local plan but increasingly councils offering lots of new greenbelt housing in their local plans, especially Tory ones, have been thrown out by local voters in favour of NIMBY LD, Green and Independent councils who adjust their local plans in a more NIMBY direction accordingly. After Chesham and Amersham Gove too has scrapped mandatory central government new housing targets too
I was unclear on whether they actually had been made advisory, not mandatory, or whether that was merely part of the latest reform proposals.
However, certainly many local authorities have already started treating them as advisory so it matters little..
What is the case, however, is notwithstanding that new Local Plans still have to identify sufficient sites - though naturally councils will low ball the numbers as much as they can.
And here's thing thing - you can never go low enough for NIMBYs. Yes, I'm a planning hawk compared to the average voter, but you simply won't build enough houses without making councils permit them (yes, developers are also very disreputable on the issue as well), since there will always be a group of voters unhappy. You will never satisfy those who, in practice, are simply against anything.
Don't build on green fields (and let's pretend it's all Green Belt!), go brownfield. No, don't build that many on that brownfield site. We need houses, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it. No, don't build the infrastructure either! And so on.
It's a race to the bottom. That's why it is a balance - sometimes government has to lead and give us what we need, not just what we demand. You know who might have been able to do that? A government with a huge majority in a period of major national transition.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
I assume GardenWalker's 5.5% is the doppelganger nonsense, but he doesn't actually specify. The doppelganger model which is built upon the UK's economy being most like the US's, and not much like Europe's. Followed by a huge American boom. Bingo, Britain "falls behind".
As you point out it's rather unlikely that, had we not left the EU, we would have grown markedly faster than any other major western european nation.
The IMF predict we will grow faster than all european G7 members in the next few years anyway:
The biggest component of the IMF's forecast is working age population.
Does anyone look at country-level data in terms of GDP divided by the size of the working age population?
When we think in terms of productivity, and whether a country's economy is developing, it feels like it would be really useful as a way of stripping out the effects of where that country is along the process of the demographic transition, and correct for boosts to headline GDP created by importing working age immigrants.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think. Gove has now reflected those views at central government level too
Although voters don't want more building on the green belt, they also don't want to get poorer. And it's beginning to look like the first is causing the second.
But @kle4 is right; council planning committees don't have that much discretion about individual planning applications. All the planning committee can really do is say whether application X is within the rules of the local plan or not. Those rules are often tightly, meanly drawn, but that's another matter. Hyped Local Campaigns against specific developments make a lot of noise (and win a lot of elections) but don't really change that many decisions from what would have happened anyway. Local plan designations are way more important for that.
But ultimately, electorates get the governments they deserve, because they get the governments they vote for. If we think that our governments are stupid, short-sighted and dishonest, well...
Council planning committees have far too much discretion about individual plannjng applications. Over a quarter of all new house building applications are rejected and that's despite the system putting off people from even trying to lodge an application unless it will be accepted. This means that small firms can't afford to even try to house build let alone do it rapidly.
So instead we have the farce of an oligopoly of firms that can play the system exploiting it to their advantage.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think. Gove has now reflected those views at central government level too
Although voters don't want more building on the green belt, they also don't want to get poorer. And it's beginning to look like the first is causing the second.
But kle4 is right; council planning committees don't have that much discretion about individual planning applications. All the planning committee can really do is say whether application X is within the rules of the local plan or not. Those rules are often tightly, meanly drawn, but that's another matter. Hyped Local Campaigns against specific developments make a lot of noise (and win a lot of elections) but don't really change that many decisions from what would have happened anyway. Local plan designations are way more important for that.
But ultimately, electorates get the governments they deserve, because they get the governments they vote for. If we think that our governments are stupid, short-sighted and dishonest, well...
Council planning committees have far too much discretion about individual plannjng applications. Over a quarter of all new house building applications are rejected and that's despite the system putting off people from even trying to lodge an application unless it will be accepted.
Given the number of applications which are dealt with under delegated powers, even if every planning committee decision was a refusal I don't think they can be blamed for all of that quarter.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
It’s a shame that so many children can only get on the housing ladder with help from their parents. It would be so much better if house prices were lower and they could afford to buy a home with their own savings and income.
North of Watford gap many can but I am in favour of inherited wealth and the family so have no problem with parental assistance for their childrens' deposits
I have no problem with parents helping if they can afford to do so, but that shouldn't be a requirement. That's the difference.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
I assume GardenWalker's 5.5% is the doppelganger nonsense, but he doesn't actually specify. The doppelganger model which is built upon the UK's economy being most like the US's, and not much like Europe's. Followed by a huge American boom. Bingo, Britain "falls behind".
As you point out it's rather unlikely that, had we not left the EU, we would have grown markedly faster than any other major western european nation.
The IMF predict we will grow faster than all european G7 members in the next few years anyway:
The biggest component of the IMF's forecast is working age population.
Does anyone look at country-level data in terms of GDP divided by the size of the working age population?
When we think in terms of productivity, and whether a country's economy is developing, it feels like it would be really useful as a way of stripping out the effects of where that country is along the process of the demographic transition, and correct for boosts to headline GDP created by importing working age immigrants.
Yep, there's been some good work done on that, and it throws up some rather surprising stats.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
That's a misleading quote. If you read the article, it says:
"A staggering 64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder."
In other words, it's almost impossible for people to get onto the property ladder without the help of mum and dad. And most parents can't afford to gift little Johnny £32k.
Supply and demand. Everyone in the world wants to own a UK property, if they can afford it.
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
That's complete nonsense. If you don't like the Brexit that we were 'manoeuvred into for personal ambition', perhaps you should put some of the blame on Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, whose personal ambition blocked us from getting Theresa May's Brexit instead.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
That's a misleading quote. If you read the article, it says:
"A staggering 64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder."
In other words, it's almost impossible for people to get onto the property ladder without the help of mum and dad. And most parents can't afford to gift little Johnny £32k.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
It’s a shame that so many children can only get on the housing ladder with help from their parents. It would be so much better if house prices were lower and they could afford to buy a home with their own savings and income.
North of Watford gap many can but I am in favour of inherited wealth and the family so have no problem with parental assistance for their childrens' deposits
I have no problem with parents helping if they can afford to do so, but that shouldn't be a requirement. That's the difference.
Well unless you earn about £100k+ a year it pretty much is a requirement if you want to buy a property in London and the Home Counties.
Otherwise if you want to buy a property entirely on your own on an average salary then you have to move north of the Watford Gap
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think. Gove has now reflected those views at central government level too
Although voters don't want more building on the green belt, they also don't want to get poorer. And it's beginning to look like the first is causing the second.
But kle4 is right; council planning committees don't have that much discretion about individual planning applications. All the planning committee can really do is say whether application X is within the rules of the local plan or not. Those rules are often tightly, meanly drawn, but that's another matter. Hyped Local Campaigns against specific developments make a lot of noise (and win a lot of elections) but don't really change that many decisions from what would have happened anyway. Local plan designations are way more important for that.
But ultimately, electorates get the governments they deserve, because they get the governments they vote for. If we think that our governments are stupid, short-sighted and dishonest, well...
Council planning committees have far too much discretion about individual plannjng applications. Over a quarter of all new house building applications are rejected and that's despite the system putting off people from even trying to lodge an application unless it will be accepted.
Given the number of applications which are dealt with under delegated powers, even if every planning committee decision was a refusal I don't think they can be blamed for all of that quarter.
There is a power imbalance; councillors are much more likely to stretch their "no benefit of the doubt" refusal powers against a small development than a big one, because there is less risk of it being appealed.
But thinking about some of the things that have been proposed near me, some proposals didn't have a hope in hell of being passed because they were blatantly outside the current rules. Maybe those particular rules shouldn't exist, maybe there should be minimal rules, but that doesn't have much to do with the existence of council planning committees.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think
Which is not their job, which is to judge applications against local and national planning policy (also, I don't know why you are bringing housing on the Green Belt into it, planning committees consider a lot more than matters in the Green Belt as you know).
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Of course planning decisions have to be in line with the local plan but increasingly councils offering lots of new greenbelt housing in their local plans, especially Tory ones, have been thrown out by local voters in favour of NIMBY LD, Green and Independent councils who adjust their local plans in a more NIMBY direction accordingly. After Chesham and Amersham Gove too has scrapped mandatory central government new housing targets too
I was unclear on whether they actually had been made advisory, not mandatory, or whether that was merely part of the latest reform proposals.
However, certainly many local authorities have already started treating them as advisory so it matters little..
What is the case, however, is notwithstanding that new Local Plans still have to identify sufficient sites - though naturally councils will low ball the numbers as much as they can.
And here's thing thing - you can never go low enough for NIMBYs. Yes, I'm a planning hawk compared to the average voter, but you simply won't build enough houses without making councils permit them (yes, developers are also very disreputable on the issue as well), since there will always be a group of voters unhappy. You will never satisfy those who, in practice, are simply against anything.
Don't build on green fields (and let's pretend it's all Green Belt!), go brownfield. No, don't build that many on that brownfield site. We need houses, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it. No, don't build the infrastructure either! And so on.
It's a race to the bottom. That's why it is a balance - sometimes government has to lead and give us what we need, not just what we demand. You know who might have been able to do that? A government with a huge majority in a period of major national transition.
Starmer is welcome to propose building new housing all over the greenbelt if he wins the next election. We Tories would oppose him every step of the way in opposition if he does propose that and would also be joined by the LDs in opposing such plans
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
That's complete nonsense. If you don't like the Brexit that we were 'manoeuvred into for personal ambition', perhaps you should put some of the blame on Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, whose personal ambition blocked us from getting Theresa May's Brexit instead.
If things have deteriorated to the point that you are all arguing about who is to blame for Brexit, then I think we can agree it has gone badly. If it had gone right, you would be arguing about who gets the credit...
Interesting comments from Trump on Ukraine today. He said that he'll tell Putin, "If you don't make a deal, we're going to give them [Ukraine] a lot. We're going to give them more than they've ever got if we have to."
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt.
Less than 30% of UK voters currently support the Tories.
Councils have too little power, or perhaps too little of the power we want (placemaking), and too much of the power we don’t want (pettifogging).
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
No, councils have too much power. It's time to smash planning committees to pieces and just get rid of all of them.
Planning committees can only do what government permits them to do (when they go beyond that, as they frequently do, their decisions get overturned). The local planning policies their councils pass have to be signed off as sound under national rules.
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
59% of UK voters oppose allowing more housing to be built on the green belt. Planning cttees only reflect what their voters think
Which is not their job, which is to judge applications against local and national planning policy (also, I don't know why you are bringing housing on the Green Belt into it, planning committees consider a lot more than matters in the Green Belt as you know).
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Of course planning decisions have to be in line with the local plan but increasingly councils offering lots of new greenbelt housing in their local plans, especially Tory ones, have been thrown out by local voters in favour of NIMBY LD, Green and Independent councils who adjust their local plans in a more NIMBY direction accordingly. After Chesham and Amersham Gove too has scrapped mandatory central government new housing targets too
I was unclear on whether they actually had been made advisory, not mandatory, or whether that was merely part of the latest reform proposals.
However, certainly many local authorities have already started treating them as advisory so it matters little..
What is the case, however, is notwithstanding that new Local Plans still have to identify sufficient sites - though naturally councils will low ball the numbers as much as they can.
And here's thing thing - you can never go low enough for NIMBYs. Yes, I'm a planning hawk compared to the average voter, but you simply won't build enough houses without making councils permit them (yes, developers are also very disreputable on the issue as well), since there will always be a group of voters unhappy. You will never satisfy those who, in practice, are simply against anything.
Don't build on green fields (and let's pretend it's all Green Belt!), go brownfield. No, don't build that many on that brownfield site. We need houses, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it. No, don't build the infrastructure either! And so on.
It's a race to the bottom. That's why it is a balance - sometimes government has to lead and give us what we need, not just what we demand. You know who might have been able to do that? A government with a huge majority in a period of major national transition.
Starmer is welcome to propose building new housing all over the greenbelt if he wins the next election. We Tories would oppose him every step of the way in opposition if he does propose that and would also be joined by the LDs in opposing such plans
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
That's complete nonsense. If you don't like the Brexit that we were 'manoeuvred into for personal ambition', perhaps you should put some of the blame on Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, whose personal ambition blocked us from getting Theresa May's Brexit instead.
If things have deteriorated to the point that you are all arguing about who is to blame for Brexit, then I think we can agree it has gone badly. If it had gone right, you would be arguing about who gets the credit...
Boris's great political achievement was breaking the impasse, but I don't think you can give him the credit for creating it.
Before spouting shit about this supposed loss of 5.5% gdp please explain why the UK should have grown by 7.4%+the mythical 5.5% when the eu didn't even manage 7.4%
The 5.5% is a made up counter factual no one can prove spouted by remainers to make them feel like they were right.
I used actual figures included the sources not a number that some shit for brains economist plucked out of thin air and remainers jumped on
So we have slightly outperformed the EU since 2019, are predicted to do so over the next 4-5 years but Brexit remains a disaster. This is so endemic and such an unequivocal fact in our media I do not find it surprising that many have been persuaded it has been a mistake. But it is really nonsense. Our successes and failures are a consequence of our own decisions good and mad. The fact that a significant percentage of the latter has still left us ahead says a lot about the EU but not much about our decision to leave it.
Personally, I think the real questions people should be asking is why both the UK & European growth rates have been so terrible since 2008, whilst the US has gone from strength to strength.
Lack of investment in infrastructure due to misguided implementation of austerity? Labour supply issues? Planning issues?
Whatever it is, either it’s Europe-wide or the same malaise has multiple different causes in different countries & that lack of growth is one of the major macro economic issues that’s driving the politics of Western Europe today.
& it’s not due to population drops either - you see the same stagnation whether you plot GDP or GDP per capita.
An entirely fair point. Much of the argument is two bald men fighting over a comb. Neither the UK, nor most EU nations, are achieving more than weak growth.
Although, a further issue with the US is why does its impressive growth rate simply not show up in the living standards of so much of its population? So many complaints one hears from the US about stagnant real wages sound very familiar.
It does, but it is inordinately soaked up by the 1%.
There may be a clue here somewhere about what happens to economies when income is concentrated in a gilded elite.
It's extraordinary how the benefits of growth have been captured by the elite.
The median standard of living in the USA is 25% higher than here. It simply should not have a life expectancy that's four years lower.
Yes, you look at a country that’s as wealthy as the US & their life expectancy & wonder what on earth is going on.
Last time I looked, IIRC a good chunk of it is people killing themselves with guns, to which they have very easy access. The legally prescribed opioid epidemic is another large chunk, again something that’s unique to the US in scale.
The rest is the consequences of US healthcare issues, which show up almost everywhere. This is why it’s also worth remembering that the US spends 20% of it’s GDP on healthcare, a vast sum compared to peer nations, when making these comparisons. Even when taking this waste into account, the US is still considerably richer on a GDP per capita basis than Western Europe though.
I've explained the difference on here before, but to repeat:
- Americans work about 12% longer on average than we do - Americans piss away almost three times as much on healthcare as we do per head, for much worse outcomes - the dollar is unusually strong, at the moment, maybe 20% overvalued
These three factors together explain almost all the difference. Added to that a much more skewed income distribution and you see why, when you visit the US, unless you hang out with the vastly wealthy, living standards aren't that different.
(Except in housing, where American houses are 2.5x as big as ours, but there's no way to defend our terrible record in this area, just as there's no way to defend America's gun laws or healthcare).
When you look at attempts to decompose these differences (which are real), they do not by any means explain “all” the difference.
Your maths needs work.
American GDP per head is about 70% higher than ours ($76,398 vs $45,850 in 2022), so they make $17 for each $10 we make.
If you cut their hours by twelve percent, they lose $2.04, giving them $14.96.
If you cut their remaining GDP of $14.96 by twelve percent to give them the same level of healthcare spending per capita as ours, that's another $1.80 or so.
So they are now making $13.16. Then if you cut their GDP by 20% to allow for dollar overvaluation, that's another $2.28 so they are now making $10.52, which is basically the same as us.
That's before you allow for the skewed income distribution, or the ridiculous expense of eating well there, or the extra costs necessary because the poorer public transport or the more extreme climate.
We have nothing to envy in the bastard child of the Empire.
And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price
Because of deliberate inflation by your party, with catastrophic results for the UK economy.
Who cares about the UK economy if Tory voters are rich?
It's also bizarre that HYUFD compares extreme values in the UK (Surrey or London) with the average US house price. Like comparing NYC house prices with the average UK price. One might think he's trying to persuade us of something.
PS Just for the record, this is what he said, before he edits it: "And home owners in Surrey or London have assets almost double the US average house price"
This is not a good thing, given that the average US buyer gets a whole lot more square footage for their $.
In the UK the older property owning generation is holding the next hostage & forcing them to pay through the nose for shelter in order to line their own pockets to pay for their expensive cruises.
Economically this is not productive & it’s far from obvious why a fortunate subset of the population deserve this unearned income.
The younger generation in the UK, especially in the South are and will inherit more than any generation before them
We've been through this before. The younger generation don't inherit anything. Their much older parents do.
Some will via gifts for deposits from grandparents or from their parents
Honestly, you really should know better. This is a survey of 1,100 Zoopla users who, by definition, are people buying, or looking to buy, houses. It therefore doesn't include the millions who never look at Zoopla because they have no prospect of buying a house. So it's two-thirds of a small, atypical, self-selecting subsample.
An ice cream "poll". Though probably more scientifically accurate than Trafalgar.
That's a gross oversimplification, but... basically yes. No Boris, No Brexit and certainly not the Brexit he manovered us into for personal ambition.
That's complete nonsense. If you don't like the Brexit that we were 'manoeuvred into for personal ambition', perhaps you should put some of the blame on Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, whose personal ambition blocked us from getting Theresa May's Brexit instead.
If things have deteriorated to the point that you are all arguing about who is to blame for Brexit, then I think we can agree it has gone badly. If it had gone right, you would be arguing about who gets the credit...
Boris's great political achievement was breaking the impasse, but I don't think you can give him the credit for creating it.
Boris is responsible for everything bad, down to the Harrying of the North, Joe Dolce keeping "Vienna" off number 1, and the shrinkage of Curly-Wurlies. I am convinced of it. It is a True Fact.
There are better statistics available on naturalization in the US, than on birth tourism. For example: "USCIS welcomed 967,500 new citizens in fiscal year 2022 during naturalization ceremonies held across the United States and around the world. This is a 20% increase from last year and the highest number of naturalizations seen since FY 2008." source: https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/naturalization-statistics
(Some of our politicians like to attend the naturalization ceremonies, especially the ones on July 4th.)
You mean reasonably smart politicos like former US Representative and current GOP candidate for WA Governor in 2024, Dave Reichert?
It struck me that it was quite something that we accepted and thought "this is f**king brilliant" into our culture in way I think would have been more troublesome for the US or French, for instance. And also struck me that it was something that was profoundly un-brexiteer in the way it is commonly expressed by the likes of the Mail or Mogg.
Possibly I am also a bit tipsy and on holiday for two weeks, however,
The Heritage Orchestra stuff is indeed f**king brilliant. I’ve been to a couple of gigs, one of which was in an opera house, of a full orchestra playing house music. It’s an unforgettable experience, and a reminder that music and musicians can cross boundaries of style and instruments.
A few years ago, the BBC did “The Ibiza Prom” at the RAH, definitely one way to get the next generation of young people interested in classical music. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xs3BXVTF7mw
I’ve also seen 2Cellos live, again playing modern music on classical instruments.
Comments
Boris Johnson and particularly Team Farage perpetuated lies to ensure "leave" prevailed at the EURef.
Edit. Although in Johnson's case he didn't realise his lies would take it over the line. The last thing he wanted. But it got him into Downing Street, so what the Hell?
Doing a stupid thing for the second time is more stupid
If Boris had been paying attention during his classics degree, he might have heard of some of them.
And yet PB’s very own Alan bloody Whicker doesn’t rate Norway. How odd.
And the answer is certainly thousands, probably tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands:
"There are no statistics about the 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year.[4] The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, estimated in 2012 that there were approximately 40,000 annual births to parents in the United States as birth tourists.[5][6] The center also estimated in 2012 that total births to temporary immigrants in the United States (e.g., tourists, students, guest workers) could be as high as 200,000.[7][unreliable source?]
Russian birth tourism to Florida to 'maternity hotels' in the 2010s is documented.[3][8][9] Birth tourism packages complete with lodging and medical care delivered in Russian begin at $20,000, and go as high as $84,700 for an apartment in Miami's Trump Tower II complete with a "gold-tiled bathtub and chauffeured Cadillac Escalade."[9]
One option for mainland Chinese mothers to give birth is Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, where the cost is cheaper and travel does not require a U.S. visa.[10] More than 70% of the newborns in Saipan have birth tourist PRC parents who take advantage of the 45-day visa-free visitation rules of the territory and the Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands to ensure that their children can have American citizenship. There were 282 of these births in 2012.[11] At least one airline in Hong Kong requests that women who are "observed to have a body size or shape resembling a pregnant woman" submit to a pregnancy test before they are allowed to fly to Saipan.[12]
As of 2015, Los Angeles is considered a center of the maternity tourism industry, which caters mostly to Asian women from China and Taiwan;[13] authorities in the city there closed 14 maternity tourism "hotels" in 2013.[14] The industry is difficult to close down since it is not illegal for a pregnant woman to travel to the U.S.[14]"
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_tourism
As you can see, that article is somewhat dated. But I think it likely that the US has more "birth tourists" than any other nation. (From time to time I have seen articles saying that thousands of South Korean women alone came here to give birth each year.)
And local Council voters. Probably not much different.
Far too many seem to think that their community should look exactly as it did when they were youthful.
And cater to the needs and desires of the over 55's.
Hence. No ball games. No youth clubs. No nightlife. No school facilities. No new housing. Moans when bank branches close. Moans when a micropub or a softplay facility tries to move in to the empty branch. Nowt for the young at all. And precious little for families with young children.
Nimbys can get fucked.
Don't get me wrong, I am in agreement with your aims.
But, until we have a society which doesn't fear the young we won't get far.
It was the Covid lockdowns which damaged nightclubs profits more than anything
The result is a lowest common denominator disaster zone.
Doing a stupid thing for the nth time is stupid
Doing a stupid thing for the n+1th time is more stupid
"USCIS welcomed 967,500 new citizens in fiscal year 2022 during naturalization ceremonies held across the United States and around the world. This is a 20% increase from last year and the highest number of naturalizations seen since FY 2008."
source: https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/naturalization-statistics
(Some of our politicians like to attend the naturalization ceremonies, especially the ones on July 4th.)
Pettifrogging is presumably the very small braid detail in regimental jackets.
Brits don’t realise this, but it is.
Next door you have wealthy incomers who bought when the area was so-so - house in a cheap area. Big rip out and redo on the house. Expensive hybrid or EV parked out front.
One thing to consider is the former group, even when their current car is compliant, expect the next step to happen soon. Reduce the emission levels, again, and take *their* car. They all know someone who had to sell their car outside London because of LEZ. They see it as pricing them off the road, in favour of the incomers with the money for a brand new car.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/property-news/revealed-how-much-the-bank-of-mum-and-dad-gives-children-for-deposits/
Also, something like 90+% of applications don't get near a planning committee.
Fundamentally the problem with planning committees is that local councils want the planning system to be a way of saying No to things, whereas central government (historically) wants the planning system to be a way of saying Yes to things.
It's a balance which was already leaning too far toward No, and since Boris's failed attempt at reform and the current government's retreat to pleasing its absolute core, has now been smashed as the government no longer even wants it to say Yes anymore.
There must also rightly be a degree of local situation influencing planning - who want's brick buildings begin built in the centre of Bath for example.
Having said that, HMG could legislate to make planning easier. At the moment our village is not a designated development village in Dorset so no new buildings can be built unless they are replacing an old one that is knocked down. As a consequence of course the village is slowly dying, frozen in time.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/05/17/d5ba5/1
Of course, there will always be an element of recognising local sentiment, that's life and politics, and some policies are judgement calls (eg the what is 'in keeping' question, or what impact is there on local amenity etc) and committees can reasonably take a view different to an officer recommendation, and that can be upheld by an inspector. Most committee members are sensible (and since they will be from across a local authority area to some degree, not wholly parochial) and look for the edge cases they can refuse for defendable reasons.
But as you also know but pretend not to know because you think it is funny, if the only thing planning committees do is listen to their local voters and ignore planning policies, it does no good for those voters because the decisions get approved anyway, just not by them.
I mean seriously, if you refuse something that is obviously in line with policy and it then gets approval anyway by an inspector (which happens a lot), do you seriously think you get a benefit from local voters for it? Especially when your local opponent is likely to be just as opposed to the development as you are.
No! All the voters will remember is that the housing got built anyway - and you just have to hope they don't blame you.
ETA: Oh, and if you are on your local planning committee do be sure not to state publicly that you think the only thing that matters is reflecting what the local voters think about an application - it could open up the committee's decision to challenge, particularly if the vote was close, on the basis the stated reasons for refusal were not the reason reasons, and you were acting irrationally. Try to always slip in at least one planning policy reason for opposing - and better than that LD MP and her 5G ridiculousness (notably in that case the official reason for refusal was something else).
Although voters don't want more building on the green belt, they also don't want to get poorer. And it's beginning to look like the first is causing the second.
But @kle4 is right; council planning committees don't have that much discretion about individual planning applications. All the planning committee can really do is say whether application X is within the rules of the local plan or not. Those rules are often tightly, meanly drawn, but that's another matter. Hyped Local Campaigns against specific developments make a lot of noise (and win a lot of elections) but don't really change that many decisions from what would have happened anyway. Local plan designations are way more important for that.
But ultimately, electorates get the governments they deserve, because they get the governments they vote for. If we think that our governments are stupid, short-sighted and dishonest, well...
So, again, we have an unearned transfer of wealth from those who don’t own property to those who do, or whose parent’s did, resulting in the latter having a massive incentive to constrain housing supply in order to line their own pockets. Something they are able to do now that they’ve abstracted all that wealth from those who would like to see more housing being built.
This is economic madness.
"A staggering 64% of parents whose grown-up children own a home have given them money to help them onto the property ladder."
In other words, it's almost impossible for people to get onto the property ladder without the help of mum and dad. And most parents can't afford to gift little Johnny £32k.
It struck me that it was quite something that we accepted and thought "this is f**king brilliant" into our culture in way I think would have been more troublesome for the US or French, for instance. And also struck me that it was something that was profoundly un-brexiteer in the way it is commonly expressed by the likes of the Mail or Mogg.
Possibly I am also a bit tipsy and on holiday for two weeks, however,
I would like to see a lot more attention paid to the effect of high house prices on the economy more generally.
However, certainly many local authorities have already started treating them as advisory so it matters little..
What is the case, however, is notwithstanding that new Local Plans still have to identify sufficient sites - though naturally councils will low ball the numbers as much as they can.
And here's thing thing - you can never go low enough for NIMBYs. Yes, I'm a planning hawk compared to the average voter, but you simply won't build enough houses without making councils permit them (yes, developers are also very disreputable on the issue as well), since there will always be a group of voters unhappy. You will never satisfy those who, in practice, are simply against anything.
Don't build on green fields (and let's pretend it's all Green Belt!), go brownfield. No, don't build that many on that brownfield site. We need houses, but we don't have the infrastructure to support it. No, don't build the infrastructure either! And so on.
It's a race to the bottom. That's why it is a balance - sometimes government has to lead and give us what we need, not just what we demand. You know who might have been able to do that? A government with a huge majority in a period of major national transition.
When we think in terms of productivity, and whether a country's economy is developing, it feels like it would be really useful as a way of stripping out the effects of where that country is along the process of the demographic transition, and correct for boosts to headline GDP created by importing working age immigrants.
So instead we have the farce of an oligopoly of firms that can play the system exploiting it to their advantage.
I mean, it's not a great historical trend. And there are so many fewer train stations these days. Imagine the over-crowding.
Otherwise if you want to buy a property entirely on your own on an average salary then you have to move north of the Watford Gap
But thinking about some of the things that have been proposed near me, some proposals didn't have a hope in hell of being passed because they were blatantly outside the current rules. Maybe those particular rules shouldn't exist, maybe there should be minimal rules, but that doesn't have much to do with the existence of council planning committees.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/eric-clapton-racist-outburst-details/
https://www.dvidshub.net/image/2304865/8th-annual-jblm-veterans-day-naturalization-ceremony
Also current Governor Jay Inslee and US Representative Pramila Jayapal?
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-welcomes-501-new-american-citizens-at-july-fourth-ceremony/
Have attended a couple of these naturalization ceremonies at Seattle Center, under the Space Needle. Check it out!
A few years ago, the BBC did “The Ibiza Prom” at the RAH, definitely one way to get the next generation of young people interested in classical music. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xs3BXVTF7mw
I’ve also seen 2Cellos live, again playing modern music on classical instruments.
You can play this one at my funeral - “For An Angel” - Paul Van Dyk and Paavo Järvi HR Orchestra https://youtube.com/watch?v=gAKy_R1XUBI