LOL at the incompetence of the 'Good Law Project':
"Interesting. HM Government has received £539,766 in legal costs from @JolyonMaugham’s Good Law Project and paid out £63,738 in the past seven years. Out of 52 cases HMG has won 14, lost two and settled 15. A further 31 cases were withdrawn by the @GoodLawProject"
How can students afford to bring their family with them? And more importantly why would any student want ma and pa with them, cramping their social life .
I suspect the India Trade Deal is hitting the buffers because they wanted more visas and in the current climate that wouldn’t be a good look.
This isn’t 1st world “I’ll hang about with my mates and drink for 3 years” bullshit.
This is serious, “climb the economic ladder” stuff. My wife came from Peru like this - the family scrimped and saved. She worked every hour that she wasn’t studying.
Is there a tradition, I wonder, for right-wing PBers to marry foreigners?
Maybe, I actually think right wingers are much more open to meeting and being with people who aren't from the same backgrounds as them or don't agree with them. There's no "never kissed a Lefty" t-shirts for sale, for example, but loads of lefties make it a point of pride that they haven't. I don't know any right winger that gives enough of a fuck about politics to make it a deal breaker. I don't think that's true everywhere though, the US is much more polarised and right wingers there are quite insular and don't date lefties or foreigners.
I think that Brits who don't give much of a fuck about politics aren't "right wing" or "left wing" in any meaningful sense. A serious British right-winger would probably find a left-wing partner pretty irritating, and vice versa.
I'm not sure Clement and Violet Attlee would agree with you.
It’s incredibly ignorant to claim that Brexit has increased democracy.
Brexit has enabled and empowered an ideology of “executive power” which has seen, inter alia, prorogation of parliament, a debauch of Lords appointments, public pronouncements against the rule of law, the imposition of FPTP in local elections, etc etc.
I always said that the only way to properly cement Brexit is to turn it into a platform of democratic renewal, but so far as I can tell not a single Brexiter (with the exception maybe of Richard Tyndall) was actually interested in that.
As for the economics, Britain has seen effectively zero productivity growth since 2010. Brexit has clearly pushed the country off its high FDI path, and damaged export performance. The decline in the pound has helped to drive inflation, as has the disruption of the labour market.
I don’t believe Brexit is the core issue behind Britain’s malaise, which has its seeds all the way back in the 80s, but it has effectively delivered seven wasted years in which the country has grown relatively poorer and, I would argue, simply unhappier.
I would hope you would not be surprised to find I agreed with you in large part. I always viewed Brexit as the first necessary step in a process of radical reform of our political system and structures. The administrations since Brexit have shown no interest in that but I would still hope that future administrations would be willing to take things further.
I am content with the fact we have left the EU but impatient to see large scale further changes to our politics.
I think @Gardenwalker is being deliberately provocative to suggest that 'Britain's malaise' has 'seeds back in the 80s', unless he's referring to the 1880s. We've been declining relative to the rest of the world since 1850, then you have the massive liquidation and spaffing of resources involved in fighting two world wars, then you have the poison of state socialism during the post-war consensus era, which left Britain stagnating as 'the sick man of Europe'. Thatcher's reforms in response were painful - some perhaps even misguided, but describing them as the 'seed' of anything just isn't a credible standpoint.
A darling of PBs centre-lefties seems to be Denmark - a country that neatly avoided a post-war socialist period and reaped significant benefits.
Not deliberately provocative at all, nor meant as any especial slight to Thatcher, who implemented many vital and necessary reforms.
I mean, our current economic malaise, reliance on consumer debt and the gradual selling out of the economy to foreign interests, and our hollowed-out state with its ideological aversion to state-enabled economic development.
Difference between position (where you are) and velocity (direction and speed of travel).
Given where Britain was in the 1970s, there was a decent case for something like Thatcherism; it addressed the problems with the Heath-Wilson system. Not always perfectly, and creating some of the problems we now have, but it was a decent shout and a lot of it has stuck around for good reasons.
Britain in the 2020s has a different set of problems and opportunities. The idea that Thatcherism upon Thatcherism is going to take the country where we want to go is pretty unlikely. We're starting in a different place, it's unlikely we want to go further in the same direction.
But that's all the Maggie Cosplay generation, whether that's Sunak or Johnson or Truss can come up with. Worse than that, they're not as good as she was at her best, so we have a less intelligent cartoon parody, shorn of most of the moral underpinning.
I find it hard to believe De Santis would beat Newsom in a real national election.
He would, Newsom is a woke elitist coastal liberal of the type the rustbelt swing states rejected in 2016 when they voted for Trump over Hillary. Biden has at least proved he can connect with rustbelt voters with his 2020 win
In his personal life, Newsom is the most traditional All American candidate you could imagine. I think he could transcend the woke elitist label.
The state has almost no role in education in California, it's all delegated to counties and cities.
Actually, I am going to weigh in properly on this one.
California education is a terrible mixed bag depending on where you live. Local cities are essentially responsible for setting the curriculum and providing all the funding.
Beverly Hills, for example, raises its own property and sales tax, and is responsible for paying for its police and schools. Beverly Hills High is - therefore - incredibly opulent, with facilities that would make most British private schools blush.
We are in Los Angeles, the city, and we have decent - but not amazing - public schools.
Cross over to Inglewood, and it's a different story. Like Beverly Hills, Inglewood is a city. But its tax base is narrow and the value of its properties low. School funding there is going to be dramatically lower than in Beverly Hills.
There are really two classes of people in the US. The top 70% and the rest. Life is very very good for the top 70%: low crime, high longevity, big houses, high incomes. I’ll leave aside the bad food, but California is a possible exception that anyway.
It’s really, really shite for the bottom 30%.
In Britain, life is very good for the top 10%, dreary for the middle 80%, and shite for the bottom 10%.
Your numbers may vary…
Even the bottom 10% don't have to worry about health care costs.
Yes. It’s shite, but not “really, really” shite.
Life isn't dreary; I'd say its expensive.
One thing that is reasonable here (notwithstanding recent inflation) is food.
Our supermarket system is pretty bloody good.
Another version of the same thing, I reckon.
The drear is because many nice things are too expensive for too many. And that's true in both the private and public realms.
Comments
"Interesting. HM Government has received £539,766 in legal costs from
@JolyonMaugham’s Good Law Project and paid out £63,738 in the past seven years.
Out of 52 cases HMG has won 14, lost two and settled 15. A further 31 cases were withdrawn by the
@GoodLawProject"
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1729455623094309299
(TBF, Maugham claims the government's figures are wrong.)
It'd be interesting to know who is funding Maugham's campaigns.
NEW THREAD
Given where Britain was in the 1970s, there was a decent case for something like Thatcherism; it addressed the problems with the Heath-Wilson system. Not always perfectly, and creating some of the problems we now have, but it was a decent shout and a lot of it has stuck around for good reasons.
Britain in the 2020s has a different set of problems and opportunities. The idea that Thatcherism upon Thatcherism is going to take the country where we want to go is pretty unlikely. We're starting in a different place, it's unlikely we want to go further in the same direction.
But that's all the Maggie Cosplay generation, whether that's Sunak or Johnson or Truss can come up with. Worse than that, they're not as good as she was at her best, so we have a less intelligent cartoon parody, shorn of most of the moral underpinning.
The drear is because many nice things are too expensive for too many. And that's true in both the private and public realms.