UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
Those figures are meaningless unless you compare them with our European peers.
Yes and no. Our European peers saw their economies devastated by WW2 far more than ours, so we were growing much more slowly then them in the postwar decades, but how much of that was our underperformance and how much was that their rebuilding their economies from scratch? Hard to know. But you are right, everyone was growing faster before the oil crisis. I just wanted to point out that the 1960s and 1970s were actually a period of rapid growth for this country, better than what came before or since, before we rubbish that period completely.
Rob Blackie chosen as the Lib Dem candidate for London mayor. Doesn’t have a chance of course, but he’s a good campaigner and very active London member.
The main thing service-sellers want is access to a deep, talented labour pool.
Not - in my case - to access “cheap labour” - but rather to access a critical mass of diverse skill-sets.
The removal of that makes it harder to compete.
Not all services are the same.
It depends if the service you're selling is high-efficiency, high-skill high-wage, or if the service you're selling is to get a dozen guys to wash your car for a fiver.
We need more of the former, we don't need the latter.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
Isn't being a deficit country ultimately a disaster? Albeit one that the UK has ducked for decades by flogging off the silver, burning the furniture and eating the seedcorn.
One of the main benefits of joining the Euro would be to introduce some fiscal discipline by removing the option of yet another devaluation, which has been such a constant feature of British decline.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Did we ever get to the bottom of all the garish sweet shops on Oxford St, playing loud music to an audience of seemingly no-one?
Then you need to read the criteria for joining, which the EU has repeatedly said we would need to adhere to if we rejoined.
Not really -
Article 2
The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.
Article 49
(ex Article 49 TEU)
Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application. The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the consent of the European Parliament, which shall act by a majority of its component members. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.
The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.
So, membership of the Euro is not baked into the treaty, and could be waived if necessary as part of negotiations for accession. Frankly I think we should join the Euro anyway, but to suggest we'd have to is a repeated canard of the those who are trying to finad a reason, any reason, to continue with the failed project they persuaded a narrow majority of the country to follow, of whom a large number are suffering buyers remorse.
The main thing service-sellers want is access to a deep, talented labour pool.
Not - in my case - to access “cheap labour” - but rather to access a critical mass of diverse skill-sets.
The removal of that makes it harder to compete.
Not all services are the same.
It depends if the service you're selling is high-efficiency, high-skill high-wage, or if the service you're selling is to get a dozen guys to wash your car for a fiver.
We need more of the former, we don't need the latter.
I find the guys that wash my cars quite useful
Good for you.
You should be prepared to pay them a good, useful wage for their service then.
The main thing service-sellers want is access to a deep, talented labour pool.
Not - in my case - to access “cheap labour” - but rather to access a critical mass of diverse skill-sets.
The removal of that makes it harder to compete.
Not all services are the same.
It depends if the service you're selling is high-efficiency, high-skill high-wage, or if the service you're selling is to get a dozen guys to wash your car for a fiver.
We need more of the former, we don't need the latter.
I find the guys that wash my cars quite useful
Good for you.
You should be prepared to pay them a good, useful wage for their service then.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
Because the European Union is such a basket case it needs us?
I'm sure the fourth largest market in the world would like to get its third place spot back. Though its amusing how many people still call it the largest in the world.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
I can very safely say I'm not in that category. All about the economics for me.
WE WOULD HAVE TO JOIN THE EURO if we joined, which is the definition of an economic disaster for a deficit country like us.
Isn't being a deficit country ultimately a disaster? Albeit one that the UK has ducked for decades by flogging off the silver, burning the furniture and eating the seedcorn.
One of the main benefits of joining the Euro would be to introduce some fiscal discipline by removing the option of yet another devaluation, which has been such a constant feature of British decline.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
Though all it did was hold back the service industry of Brum, without any long term benefit to North or Welsh valleys.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
The phrase is a con trick imo. You can't level up.
That is such a pessimistic load of codswallop. No wonder you vote Labour. Of course you can level up. You can help create economic circumstances in areas that are in decline that help to reverse that decline. It has been done all over the world.
Or you can do what Labour and it's supporters have always done. Try and make everyone equal by making everything equally as shit. As per HYUFDs post on 1960s Birmingham.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
Because the European Union is such a basket case it needs us?
I'm sure the fourth largest market in the world would like to get its third place spot back. Though its amusing how many people still call it the largest in the world.
I think you missed my bit of irony there. The subject of Brexit causes you to lose your otherwise good sense of humour.
People attach too much economic meaning to membership or otherwise of the EU or indeed the Euro. It’s not a magic route to salvation nor is it a disaster. It’s an arrangement that removes some trade friction and results in somewhat higher GDP.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Would you like some heroin with your pie and mash, guv?
Type thing. One example, a formerly nice little pub in St Johns Wood borders that became a 'bar' with a stark horrid interior, uncomfortable outside area, stupid prices, and every member of staff a burly bag of muscles with no hair and impenetrable shades. You just wouldn't.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
All the economic problems that Britain now has developed and worsened during decades of EU membership.
I do want Britain to rejoin the EU for a variety of reasons, but I think that Britain's economic problems and inequalities are entirely self-generated, and could be fixed, or deteriorate further independent of Britain's relationship to the EU. My main concern with a push to rejoin is that, in the lack of a national consensus, Britain will end up spending more time obsessions about its relationship with the EU, and doing nothing to address the problems that it faces.
Much as I dislike Brexit, and think it was a monumental mistake in conception and execution, I do not think it is an order zero issue that needs to be fixed as a precondition to fixing anything else.
A sensible and sensibly expressed view. Coming from the polar opposite side of the debate, I have always acknowledged that it was perfectly possible for the UK to prosper within the EU, had the political will to do so been present. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. Now that we have left, naturally I want us to take full advantage - it seems odd to do otherwise.
People attach too much economic meaning to membership or otherwise of the EU or indeed the Euro. It’s not a magic route to salvation nor is it a disaster. It’s an arrangement that removes some trade friction and results in somewhat higher GDP.
Many people assume it results in a somewhat higher GDP as they assume that is what it does, because of the "gravity model" and other stuff like that.
But what actual evidence is there for that?
In the 1980s the then EEC nations formed the largest single market in the world, as Thatcher famously said. Now they're in third place and will drop down to fourth next year.
The EU hasn't grown well in decades. Since the EEC became the European Union, Europe has lagged behind its comparators. America and Asia have both grown much faster than Europe.
So why does it lead to higher growth, if growth is actually low?
Where's any evidence, as opposed to theory, that it leads to higher growth?
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Would you like some heroin with your pie and mash, guv?
Type thing. One example, a formerly nice little pub in St Johns Wood borders that became a 'bar' with a stark horrid interior, uncomfortable outside area, stupid prices, and every member of staff a burly bag of muscles with no hair and impenetrable shades. You just wouldn't.
One of the principle problems with NHS waiting lists is the NHS. It has a structure and ethos designed for the 1950s.
Labour will, like they did before, hose money at it from borrowing. The hose will be eagerly and greedily picked up by the BMA who do not think that £120k a year for a job where you can also have an additional private practice is enough for someone in the safest job in the known universe.
What is the answer? An acceptance by the British people that the NHS is not and never has been "the envy of the world" and that it needs substantial reform and that certain aspects of our lives we need to take responsibility for ourselves.
Additionally the medical profession needs to understand that if they want to earn megabucks they need to take some career risks and not expect the taxpayer (where the average person earns £28k year) to feather bed them just because they have the letters Dr in front of their names.
The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s. The main reason for long waiting lists is that the UK spends less on healthcare than comparable countries.
"The NHS's structure is very different to what it was in the 1950s" No shit Sherlock! The question is as to whether the structures put in place then (such as the generous provisions that allow hospital consultants to also have private practice alongside the security of their NHS contracts), ie legacy issues, still cause problems today. Answer - Yes
On waiting times, yours is a a somewhat simplistic analysis. The UK health spending per capita is 18% below EU average (if this is what you call comparable countries), and this is regrettable in my view, but the relationship to waiting times is very much more complex and a lot of it is structural and due to inefficiencies of the NHS bureaucracy. It is unlikely that without significant reform there would be a great improvement in waiting times.
Incidentally, you will be interested to know, that outside our insular NHS bubble all health systems across Europe are struggling with staffing levels.
So, you agree that we spend nearly a fifth less than the EU average, but you think the problems are structural? Why don't you try spending a fifth less on everything in your life and then see whether structural changes can compensate?
I have made efficiencies in my own business to that extent and taken haircuts to my own income. Apologists for the NHS bureaucracy boast that it doesn't make profits as though that is a good thing. Therefore it should need less spend surely?
I am slightly taking the piss. I don't know whether you have ever worked in or around the NHS? I have, and I am sad to say that it is the most inefficient organisation I have ever had dealings with. Even by public sector standards.
I am a public sector employee in higher education. I have worked with the NHS extensively. I have also worked with the private sector. I have not seen a large or consistent difference in efficiency between them. Some areas of both are more efficient, some less efficient.
I am all for improving efficiency in the NHS and my own research is often focused on that. I could write pages on how the NHS could be better. Government policy should try to make the NHS more efficient. But, of course, the devil is in the details. Often, it's Government reform that creates the inefficiencies. It's not technically the NHS, but the re-organisation of Public Health England in the middle of the pandemic into the UK Health Security Agency was one experience I lived through that was monumentally stupid. At present, NHS England are looking to make 40% reductions in headcount following a merger with NHS Digital, NHSx etc., creating turmoil that's delayed programmes. NHSx was only created recently by a Conservative government and now it's being swallowed up again.
So, organisational structures matter, sure. But having 18% less money per capita matters hugely too. You want better health services, spend more money. Other countries in Europe manage it; so can we.
Nice reply and much of it I agree with, though if you have come across the efficient bits of the NHS then I am delighted you have found them
I also agree that we should align our spending, though I don't like the idea of it being wasted on highly paid hospital consultants of whom 48.2% find the time to do private practice work, and where their salaries are only exceeded by European counterparts in Switzerland..
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
Lol. Keep trying to convince yourself Barty.
PS I think your prescription is overdue.
The key question is what counts as a decent interval that needs to elapse before a decision like this can be reconsidered.
That's not written down anywhere, but the answer is in the range "not yet" to "at some point". Hence our current stuckness.
But Brexit has to deliver real benefits for the British people, of a "yay, look at this" type, at some point. Otherwise it will deservedly die.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
That final period covers a population increase of over 8 million, which is more than the previous 40 years combined.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
Lol. Keep trying to convince yourself Barty.
PS I think your prescription is overdue.
The key question is what counts as a decent interval that needs to elapse before a decision like this can be reconsidered.
That's not written down anywhere, but the answer is in the range "not yet" to "at some point". Hence our current stuckness.
But Brexit has to deliver real benefits for the British people, of a "yay, look at this" type, at some point. Otherwise it will deservedly die.
Time has run out on your final para. Stick a fork in it.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
Hehe. Oh dear. I think that might need quite a bit of context! Selective statistics are not very helpful. Eg. Take a look at Germany's GDP since 2018. If we use that we can say our government has done a marvellous job by comparison lol.
Let me tell you. The UK in the 1970s was a basketcase. Fact. I was there.
Not incorrect, but closing down primary and tertiary industries, and selling UK assets to foreign owners wouldn't have been my remedy for poor industrial relations.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
Though all it did was hold back the service industry of Brum, without any long term benefit to North or Welsh valleys.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
The phrase is a con trick imo. You can't level up.
That is such a pessimistic load of codswallop. No wonder you vote Labour. Of course you can level up. You can help create economic circumstances in areas that are in decline that help to reverse that decline. It has been done all over the world.
Or you can do what Labour and it's supporters have always done. Try and make everyone equal by making everything equally as shit. As per HYUFDs post on 1960s Birmingham.
It's mathematics. What you're talking about is growing the economy. On which point the data shows the Conservatives have no particular expertise compared to Labour. The myth that they have runs deep though. It's perhaps the one thing that might save them from a landslide defeat at GE24. There might still be enough gullibles amongst the public to buy it. Starmer knows this too. It's why he's being so very very cautious about anything to do with money.
I think if we were to rejoin we would hold all the cards
We certainly did when we left. Look at the amazing trade deal and benefits we got.
Absolutely!
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
Lol. Keep trying to convince yourself Barty.
PS I think your prescription is overdue.
The key question is what counts as a decent interval that needs to elapse before a decision like this can be reconsidered.
That's not written down anywhere, but the answer is in the range "not yet" to "at some point". Hence our current stuckness.
But Brexit has to deliver real benefits for the British people, of a "yay, look at this" type, at some point. Otherwise it will deservedly die.
We passed the interval at 11pm on Friday 31 January 2020.
Any decision taken can be reversed at any subsequent election.
I don't think we should, obviously, but if that's what people vote for there's absolutely nothing indecent about that.
People attach too much economic meaning to membership or otherwise of the EU or indeed the Euro. It’s not a magic route to salvation nor is it a disaster. It’s an arrangement that removes some trade friction and results in somewhat higher GDP.
It might only improve GDP by £350m a week, but we could invest that into the NHS.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
That final period covers a population increase of over 8 million, which is more than the previous 40 years combined.
Makes the early period look even better then. I wonder who was in government for most of that time? Let me check my Encyclopedia Britannica. Oh, it was Labour according to that.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Would you like some heroin with your pie and mash, guv?
Type thing. One example, a formerly nice little pub in St Johns Wood borders that became a 'bar' with a stark horrid interior, uncomfortable outside area, stupid prices, and every member of staff a burly bag of muscles with no hair and impenetrable shades. You just wouldn't.
That sounds like a hipster infestation.
If only. Gangsterville, I fear. You can cut the menace with a machete.
You might not miss Wilko, but Britain’s many dying towns will Eerie city centres are being hollowed out by years of relentless decline ... and it’s no exaggeration to say that some cities and towns have been left with row upon row of boarded up shops and buildings.
It’s a doom-loop: each time another place closes, there is less of a reason for people to visit their local town centre.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was a queue of entrepreneurs and start-ups jostling to snap up the empty sites. Free marketeers like to talk about “creative destruction” but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/11/wilko-britains-dying-towns/ (£££)
The free market would allow easy change of use - the problem is often legal, regulatory, landlords, banks and councils colliding to prevent any sensible solution.
Easy change of use from what to what? As large stores close, what can they be changed to? Offices? Factories? Restaurants? There is unlikely to be much demand.
Homes perhaps, but many of these declining towns already have unused homes. Just down the road from me, there are shops that have been converted to flats, so I do not think there is an insurmountable regulatory problem, but I'm in the relatively affluent south-east.
At a low enough value, you get hipsters.
Do not call the exterminators, but allow them to breed. When they reach a critical mass, they collapse into their own bullshit, and the lower middle classes are drawn in, chasing low rents in a survivable area, artisan coffee and Tasmanian beard massages.
The biggest single issue appears to be landlords preferring to leave units empty, than cut rents to market value. That leaves a doom spiral of dilapidation, which reduces the rentable value still further. At some point they’ll either need to convert to residential or accept the hit on the property value.
I’d use a combination of carrots and sticks, double property tax on empty units but reduce it on rented units within town centre zones.
Oh, and car parking. Lots of free car parking. So much of the hollowing-out of town centres is because it’s a pain in the arse to get there, with people going to the next town or the out-of-town mall instead.
I'm not sure that lack of parking space is a major problem. My local town centre is dying as all the retailers move out, so much so that one of the large car parks recently closed due to lack of demand.
There's a reason Dunelm is doing gangbusters while the likes of Wilko are closing up shop. Shopping in a town centre is a depressing experience, it's universally charity shops that don't pay any rates, nail bars and cafes which are blatantly money laundering fronts and dead fronts.
Increasingly blatant. Why do the authorities ignore it ?
Sorry, which cafes are these?
The ones which very obviously have quite high overheads (town centre rents and rates), and equally obviously hardly any customers. I won't give any particular examples.
Tons of this in London. Places set up to repel customers rather than attract them. Fronts for drugs vice and money laundering. It's by definition impossible to measure but I bet the dark economy if it were a Footsie sector would dwarf most of the others. It's probably a big chunk of the City too.
Did we ever get to the bottom of all the garish sweet shops on Oxford St, playing loud music to an audience of seemingly no-one?
Looking at Oxford St on Google Maps, the units opposite the junction of John Prince's St/Oxford St seems to have had a Skechers replace a couple of US Candy/Money exchange/£ shops so it's reversable.
The UK is not broken beyond repair and nor is it a 'middle-poor' Western country.
The UK has the sixth-largest national economy in the world in nominal GDP and tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Our economy constitutes 2.3% of world GDP and we are the 8th easiest place to do business in the world. Standard of living here is perfectly comparable to France, Germany or the Netherlands. Employment is very high as is our HDI.
The problem is nominal GDP per capita, where because of our larger population we do slip down the rankings and there is wider regional inequality as our economy is so globalised and focused on London. But, we shouldn't be too hyberbolic about it: Manchester has hugely re-generated in the last 25 years.
More investment (over 20-30 years) in infrastructure, skills, education and R&D in the industries of the future is needed - we spend far too much on flat-tyres like pensions, debt and the NHS, that consume all our national income - and services carries us.
To hit services and London would be madness.
I lean more on the pessimism side of things buy hitting areas of success doesn't seem like a great solution to our many problems.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
That final period covers a population increase of over 8 million, which is more than the previous 40 years combined.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
UK GDP growth 1960-1979: 80%. UK GDP growth 1980-1999: 52%. UK GDP growth 2000-2019: 43%.
That final period covers a population increase of over 8 million, which is more than the previous 40 years combined.
Is that right? Remarkable stat really.
The current era of mass migration is unlike any in living memory.
We are seeing sizeable fractions of a percent of population growth per year.
This is the kind of thing you see in developing countries.
Which is why policies for a slowly growing population are a complete fucking fail.
The reason most Remainers want to Rejoin is #values - economics they think is a useful lever to get there, which is why they keep banging on about it.
I can think of two economic effects of Rejoin: (1) Sterling/$ might strengthen from c1.3 to c.1.45 - so, yes, that would improve PPP figures as they are measured in $ [not sure Sterling/Euro would move very much] and (2) it would remove some UK-EU trade frictions for goods/agricultural produce, so might add on a tiny bit (0.1-0.3%) of GDP growth. Maybe a tiny bit more with financial services passport but I think that's exaggerated and all the extra regulations would kick in there again on FS.
And, that's it.
It would do nothing to improve services (which were never part of the single market) or our regional inequality which, indeed, is why many of them voted for it in the first place. So the dial would not be shifted.
All the economic problems that Britain now has developed and worsened during decades of EU membership.
I do want Britain to rejoin the EU for a variety of reasons, but I think that Britain's economic problems and inequalities are entirely self-generated, and could be fixed, or deteriorate further independent of Britain's relationship to the EU. My main concern with a push to rejoin is that, in the lack of a national consensus, Britain will end up spending more time obsessions about its relationship with the EU, and doing nothing to address the problems that it faces.
Much as I dislike Brexit, and think it was a monumental mistake in conception and execution, I do not think it is an order zero issue that needs to be fixed as a precondition to fixing anything else.
Trying to cancel my TV licence and get a refund (moving away).
Aggressive warnings about police action if I watch TV
Deliberately misleading about what you can watch without one
You can only cancel it 14 days in advance (convinced this is so people forget)
I have to provide proof that I am moving away (so I'm sending them my visa ?!)
I'm never getting a TV licence again.
They kept sending harassing post after my dad died. I had to send a pretty emphatic letter to tell them to lay off. Even then they said they'd start up again in a year, or something, and they did.
Remember in Scotland the law re TV licensing is different. AIUI it's the PF who decides prosecutions - not the BBC or their commercial thugs. I wonder if their bumf even recognises that?
I very much doubt if the licence fee will make it to 2027. But the BBC are totally unready for any replacement.
If there's an attempt to tax broadband connections to subsidise broadcast TV there will be absolute hell to pay. I can foresee actual rioting. It might of course also lead to the rapid rollout of nationwide 5G.
The smart move is a subscription model, at any rate for overseas customers on iPlayer, but there's no sign the BBC are willing to consider it. If they'd done that 15 years ago they wouldn't be in this mess now.
The single most regressive tax there is, and with some very dubious collection methods.
Does anyone watch live TV any more, apart from sports and the occasional coronation?
Fund the genuine public service broadcasting from taxation, and let the BBC either charge subscriptions or carry advertising on their entertainment channels.
How they haven’t sorted out their licensing for an international iPlayer I have no idea. They should have had most of the archive up there by now, and charging foreigners £10 a month for it would make billions. I’d buy it, or at least alternate it with Netflix.
This is completely unrealistic and ignores the very, very real issues with content licencing, residual payment deals for talent and the complexity of international content purchasing/sales. 9/10 times when the BBC procures a TV show it only purchases UK linear and streaming rights which it may then resell to Netflix.
If was going to make a BBC streaming service I'd do £6.99 per month for all non-live content. So no MOTD live or on catchup, but you do get Peaky Blinders and the recent back catalogue and make that available to cord cutters who live in the pure streaming world.
My point was that the BBC should have been working on this for the past decade, given how obvious it was going to be. The big dramas are more difficult, for the reasons you suggest of residual payments and licensing; but the soaps, comedy shows, and all the daytime crap, would be much easier.
Funding pretty much the whole production of something, but leaving out secondary streaming rights, would be a dereliction of duty for a commercial entity in recent times.
MOTD is the one programme that will never be allowed on an international iPlayer though. At least not unless they edit out all of the Premier League content that’s sold abroad separately.
But that's the point, the BBC rarely funds anywhere near the entirety of anything these days. Most of their content is licenced from the big UK players who are funded independently and they then sell domestic and international rights separately. The market has moved on a huge amount since then and taking it back to when everything was centrally approved by the BBC2 controller with BBC budgets would destroy the success of UK TV and movie production.
The BBC don't leave out streaming rights or international streaming rights, they simply can't afford to compete with Netflix and Amazon for them and it being a capitalist industry, there's little regard for sentiment when selling a product, it will go to the highest bidder.
I think we’re violently agreeing here. I’m contrasting the approach of the BBC over, say, Disney, who have managed to hold on to the rights for most of their content, and even the older stuff has ended up on their streaming service.
If BBC Worldwide, at the height of Top Gear’s popularity, had launched an international iPlayer with TG as an exclusive, they would likely be successful by now - but instead, they stuck with the old-world view of overseas licensing to TV networks, and they’re now like the guy trying to sell music CDs when everyone else has moved through Napster to Spotify.
Disney+ is yet to break even. Other parts of Disney are subsidising it.
Yes, from talking to friends who subscribe to various streaming services, a consolidation would be good for consumers and probably necessary for streamers who might not be profitable. We've seen it even here with PBers detailing their efforts to juggle services in order to watch sport while keeping children onside. It costs too much to subscribe to everything.
Disney+ are putting up fees, cracking down on password sharing and looking at introducing ads, like Netflix.
I enjoy both Disney+ and Netflix, but they're companies burning through investment while they try to win the streaming wars and work out the best model to do this...
Chatter is that Apple might buy Disney. Might even make sense (if the competition authorities allowed it).
That rumour has been doing the rounds ever since Disney bought Pixar. I don't see Apple spending the $150-170bn it would take to get Disney, not that they don't have it, just that shareholders would probably prefer the cash in a dividend than destroying $100-120bn in value by purchasing Disney.
If it means their becoming one of the surviving streamers, that might look a very good deal. Disney has taken a big share price hit recently, and is potentially a big cash stream.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
Not that long ago incomes in Brum were higher than London. It was government policy to slow development there.
'Declaring the growth in population and employment within Birmingham to be a "threatening situation", the incoming Labour Government of 1964 sought "to control the growth of office accommodation in Birmingham and the rest of the Birmingham conurbation before it got out of hand, in the same way as they control the growth of industrial employment". Although the City Council had encouraged service sector expansion during the late 1950s and early 1960s, central government extended the Control of Office Employment Act 1965 to the Birmingham conurbation from 1965, effectively banning all further office development for almost two decades.”
Labour MPs didn't want Birmingham to get too prosperous after all and its voters to start voting Tory so they lost their seats!
It is quite incredible that such thinking was rife back then. The pure stupidity of socialism in extremis. Wasn't someone on here recently trying to make out that the UK was NOT a basket case back in the 60s and 70s?
A chap I knew, looked at building a factory in the North, during the early 2000s. The local politicians didn’t want it - they were worried by the idea that “poshing the area” would cause political changes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Yep, good old caring lefties. Who needs jobs if they are in the private sector? We should all be employed by the state.
The idea was to distribute growth to other cities, it would have made sense at the time. If you have cities competing with each other for investment then someone has to be a loser.
Though all it did was hold back the service industry of Brum, without any long term benefit to North or Welsh valleys.
Levelling up is actually much harder than levelling down.
The phrase is a con trick imo. You can't level up.
That is such a pessimistic load of codswallop. No wonder you vote Labour. Of course you can level up. You can help create economic circumstances in areas that are in decline that help to reverse that decline. It has been done all over the world.
Or you can do what Labour and it's supporters have always done. Try and make everyone equal by making everything equally as shit. As per HYUFDs post on 1960s Birmingham.
No, it's just a semantic point.
Of course you can improve the economies of the regions, but that will require things that the Tories seem unwilling to contemplate. ie a redirection of investment and political control away from London.
Remarkably, Labour actually have one policy which would do both of those things. It won't work a miracle, but it is at least a step in the right direction.
We would get 80% of bang for buck by concentrating on Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester-Liverpool, and aiming to push their GDP performance to Western European standards.
If you look at London, it is supported by a huge commuter belt that does not exist in the towns you name. Even Liverpool to Manchester is a push and you could probably walk it on a good day. Northern Powerhouse Rail should be revisited, and road links reviewed. We need to convert these cities into regions: the Midlands, Merseyside, South Wales and so on.
A Manchester-Liverpool underground metro system with 4-5 different lines servicing different parts of the two cities and connecting them together with an under 30 minute journey time. Let's spend the £30-40bn to get it done.
HS2 says that by the time government procurement processes and appeals have happened it would cost £240 billion, take 75 years and stop in a random field somewhere near Widnes.
I can dig a tunnel between the two in a few seconds.
{picks up manual for Casaba Howitzer}
The civil service should be on the case of how to apply AI to the issue of infrastructure delivery. So 75 years becomes 7 months. Loads of things could become possible - building a million council houses, building new railway lines, new water and power infrastructure, etc; decarbonising all at rapid speed.
How would AI achieve any of that? Not even Leon foresees AI bricklaying. AI might put a handful of architects out of work but that's not the bottleneck.
Much of the recent talk of revolutionary AI, is very reminiscent of the talk of revolutionary blockchain from a couple of years ago.
The way to build millions more houses, is to utilise the technology that now lets you build houses in factories, for which government’s role is to sort out the planning and financing issues with such properties. Just as happened after WWII.
Wooden and prefabricated homes abroad can be built to a much higher standard than the bricks and mortar in this country.
I recently stayed with relatives in the Rockies in Alberta. They have all extremes of weather we don't face and their homes are much higher standard, and get shipped in and put up in days not months.
My host likes to joke that he's a "high elevation Williams" (hillbilly) as he lives in a wooden shack in the hills. Which is as much a wonderful bit of understatement for calling their wooden home a shack, as it is for calling the Rocky Mountains the hills.
We could do with building more stuff with wood and prefabricated in this country.
It must be possible to design and build a prefab 1 bed prefabricated unit with a 25 year design life for £50k. It would be interesting to understand what the barriers are to this happening - I would guess building regs and mortgage financing. But I think building a million of these for low cost rent (not just 1 bed - all different sizes) is the answer to the housing crisis.
Corruption in military recruiting will be eliminated. The heads of all regional recruitment centers will be fired and replaced by brave warriors who have lost their health on the frontlines but have maintained their dignity. The decision was approved at today's NSDC meeting. https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1689973671476023297
Comments
Article 2
The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.
Article 49
(ex Article 49 TEU)
Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application. The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the consent of the European Parliament, which shall act by a majority of its component members. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.
The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.
So, membership of the Euro is not baked into the treaty, and could be waived if necessary as part of negotiations for accession. Frankly I think we should join the Euro anyway, but to suggest we'd have to is a repeated canard of the those who are trying to finad a reason, any reason, to continue with the failed project they persuaded a narrow majority of the country to follow, of whom a large number are suffering buyers remorse.
You should be prepared to pay them a good, useful wage for their service then.
I'm sure the fourth largest market in the world would like to get its third place spot back. Though its amusing how many people still call it the largest in the world.
We got everything we wanted, without having to pay any membership fees or suffer any of their politics. Its great.
Zero tariff, zero quota access without a penny in membership fees, while still having the freedom to sign our own trade deals elsewhere and make our own laws. Its a great deal.
Or you can do what Labour and it's supporters have always done. Try and make everyone equal by making everything equally as shit. As per HYUFDs post on 1960s Birmingham.
PS I think your prescription is overdue.
But what actual evidence is there for that?
In the 1980s the then EEC nations formed the largest single market in the world, as Thatcher famously said.
Now they're in third place and will drop down to fourth next year.
The EU hasn't grown well in decades. Since the EEC became the European Union, Europe has lagged behind its comparators. America and Asia have both grown much faster than Europe.
So why does it lead to higher growth, if growth is actually low?
Where's any evidence, as opposed to theory, that it leads to higher growth?
I also agree that we should align our spending, though I don't like the idea of it being wasted on highly paid hospital consultants of whom 48.2% find the time to do private practice work, and where their salaries are only exceeded by European counterparts in Switzerland..
That's not written down anywhere, but the answer is in the range "not yet" to "at some point". Hence our current stuckness.
But Brexit has to deliver real benefits for the British people, of a "yay, look at this" type, at some point. Otherwise it will deservedly die.
Any decision taken can be reversed at any subsequent election.
I don't think we should, obviously, but if that's what people vote for there's absolutely nothing indecent about that.
In France tomorrow.
Let’s see how that fares. Last time was pre-Covid.
We are seeing sizeable fractions of a percent of population growth per year.
This is the kind of thing you see in developing countries.
Which is why policies for a slowly growing population are a complete fucking fail.
Disney has taken a big share price hit recently, and is potentially a big cash stream.
Of course you can improve the economies of the regions, but that will require things that the Tories seem unwilling to contemplate.
ie a redirection of investment and political control away from London.
Remarkably, Labour actually have one policy which would do both of those things. It won't work a miracle, but it is at least a step in the right direction.
edit - Something like this
https://www.boklok.co.uk/buy-a-home/find-your-new-home/on-the-lake-phase-two/
but without the massive price tag.
Corruption in military recruiting will be eliminated. The heads of all regional recruitment centers will be fired and replaced by brave warriors who have lost their health on the frontlines but have maintained their dignity. The decision was approved at today's NSDC meeting.
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1689973671476023297