Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
Gordon Brown should be excoriated over PFI (not falsely blamed for the GFC). However, in this story it looks like the real flaw is automatic price rises with RPI inflation, the sort of thing everyone is familiar with on their phone contracts.
That’s one flaw.
The number of things included in the contract is another.
The poor quality of the buildings which mean half of them are already falling down is a third.
The penalty clauses for exiting with the lack of penalty clauses for a company failing to honour its obligations is a fourth.
The original prices which were far too high are a fifth.
Using a measure of inflation the government didn’t use elsewhere is a sixth.
So - using somebody who was clearly not a trained lawyer or possessed of a functioning brain to negotiate them was insanity.
I said hair a decade ago that government ought to have legislated to set aside contracts which were manifestly unfair.
It will only be some terms in the contract that would be unfair.
There is already legislation in place to deal with unfair contract terms.
That has limited application to commercial contracts such as PFI. In broad terms, it only applies when one party is doing business with the other party on its standard terms of business. That is not the case for PFI contracts.
It still has application to commercial contracts, and there is other law available too.
So what do we do, as Nigel proposes, the govt enables a law to allow them to set aside contracts they willingly entered into but now regret ?
How are these PFI contracts, many which have been in place for many years, now "unfair" exactly ?
Its application to PFI contracts is limited to preventing either party escaping liability for death or injury caused by negligence. Not particularly helpful in terms of what is being discussed here.
The government passing a law that allowed it to set aside or alter contracts it had willingly entered into would undermine the whole basis of contract law. Even if such a law survived legal challenge, it would dramatically increase the cost of the government - commercial entities will want greater rewards to compensate for the possibility that the government might unilaterally change or void the contract.
PFI? Simple. Renegotiate them. £39 for a lightbulb is a piss-take. The contractor owner has had a great time, but now must enter the real world. What choice do they have?
There is a railway example of contract owner doing a stupid. In 2011 a fleet of new trains entered service on Stansted Express routes. Owned by an Australian financial services business, they were sold to SNCF, who set £bonkers as the lease cost.
With cheaper trains available nobody will pay £bonkers and so they sit rotting in sidings unused. We can't let contract holders insist the fee is £bonkers and let them get away with it. At least we have alternative trains that can be used. If its a PFI hospital what are they going to do if the contract is renegotiated and they don't like it?
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
If you're taking about a pay rise with nothing else changing, then yes.
But there's a different effect, which is the one I'm thinking of. There are lots of sectors - education is the one I know about, but broadly anything that has "vocation" attached to it applies- where it's not financially rational for anyone to do it. Every maths teacher could make more in finance. Every TA could make more and experience less hassle, in a supermarket.
Such people used to be considered good, valuable people. It's not entirely selfless, it's also how individuals balance the tangible and intangible rewards of work. But a combination of a decade plus pay squeeze and broader cultural stuff means that balance isn't working any more.
I agree, though I'd add that it's not just about financial rationality but also about the quality of work. In the example you give, although a TA may make little money and face a lot of hassle, the job is much more interesting and rewarding in a non-financial sense than working in a supermarket. There's part of me that thinks it's not unreasonable to pay people quite well if they're willing to do such boring, mundane jobs. Who would choose to stack shelves day in day out?
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
It's the easy assumption that people must envy you. Actually they just despise you. What they are saying is what they think.
And they probably despise you because they envy you.
Do/did you in your career settle for "the dignity of a modest living"?
I never envy other people and rarely despise them, so I guess the politics of envy/repugnance doesn't apply to me.
Have I settled for "the dignity of a modest living", which isn't my phrase? I have settled for a comfortable mid level income that seems to be significantly less than those that some on this site are very keen we should all know about.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Few people support higher wages for others.
I remember the outrage here in 2021 when the pay of delivery drivers, supermarket workers, abattoir workers and other low paid manual workers was rapidly rising.
It seemed that only educated, middle class types were allowed to have pay rises.
Likewise farmers who refuse to pay the going rate for labour are held up to be victims instead of the exploiters they are.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
And yet before other candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, Sanders was favorite in the betting to win the nomination.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
If you're taking about a pay rise with nothing else changing, then yes.
But there's a different effect, which is the one I'm thinking of. There are lots of sectors - education is the one I know about, but broadly anything that has "vocation" attached to it applies- where it's not financially rational for anyone to do it. Every maths teacher could make more in finance. Every TA could make more and experience less hassle, in a supermarket.
Such people used to be considered good, valuable people. It's not entirely selfless, it's also how individuals balance the tangible and intangible rewards of work. But a combination of a decade plus pay squeeze and broader cultural stuff means that balance isn't working any more.
Yep. This is all around in academia.
Professorial pay is negotiated individually and it's possible to get paid pretty well at that level. But at most levels below, particularly in STEM, there's a big pay gap between what could be earned elsewhere and what can be had in academia. Glancing at our pay scales:
First post-doc: £36k, progressing up to £44k
Second level post-doc, with likely some line management or at least project management; expectation to be brining in some funding: £44k, progressing to £54k
Third level, expected to be more or less self sufficient in funding and certainly managing projects and other people: £56k up to £64k
Prof, self sufficient, also providing for and managing a reasonable team of people, international reputation etc: ~£70k and upwards (I know of several on >£100k)
Those are all fixe term contract posts, dependent on others' or own funding unless there's a substantial teaching element (lecturer post).
A nearby medical tech company will pay graduates (so at least 3-4 years less education than the £36k post doc) ~£60k starting salary. Yet I'm still here; we have a steady supply of post-docs. It's not all about money - freedom to pursue what you are interested in and - let's be honest - the possibility of having your ego massaged by being a world expert in something makes up for some of that missed income.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
It's the easy assumption that people must envy you. Actually they just despise you. What they are saying is what they think.
And they probably despise you because they envy you.
Do/did you in your career settle for "the dignity of a modest living"?
I never envy other people and rarely despise them, so I guess the politics of envy/repugnance doesn't apply to me.
Have I settled for "the dignity of a modest living", which isn't my phrase? I have settled for a comfortable mid level income that seems to be significantly less than those that some on this site are very keen we should all know about.
Of course mid level income is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. Middle income countries are apparently defined by the UN as having GDP per capita between $1,036 and $12,055.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
To get rising real wages either productivity must rise or there has to be an 'wealth shift' towards workers at the expense of either the executive oligarchy or shareholders (private sector), taxpayers (public sector) or consumers (private and public sectors).
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
And yet before other candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, Sanders was favorite in the betting to win the nomination.
There were only a few days between the decisive South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday so it all happened very quickly.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
To get rising real wages either productivity must rise or there has to be an 'wealth shift' towards workers at the expense of either the executive oligarchy or shareholders (private sector), taxpayers (public sector) or consumers (private and public sectors).
In the medium to long term that is undoubtedly true and our record on productivity increases is abysmal, especially since Covid. The WFH phenomena is having a materially adverse effect on output, especially in the public sector. And yet they expect their wages to rise by more than inflation whilst producing less.
In the short term the interaction between wages and inflation is more complicated and we can have periods where wages are falling in real terms, even although productivity isn't, something we have seen quite a lot over the last few years. Right now the ratio between inflation and wages is more positive but my post was trying to show that it is actually a bit more complicated than that.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
And yet before other candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, Sanders was favorite in the betting to win the nomination.
There were only a few days between the decisive South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday so it all happened very quickly.
That's true, but what I'm saying is that candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday because they didn't want Sanders to win, rather than because their campaigns didn't have enough money to carry on a few more days.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
Yep. Paper economy vs real economy. Even your "inflation is now down to 4%" is only paper. In reality prices are up 20-30% from not very long ago, they're still going up (slowly), and wages have risen by very little if at all.
Where a beating for the Tories is in danger of becoming a rout is when they send out muppets like the Chief Secretary to insist the sky is green because thats what it says on my script. And to be fair to (sorry, have no clue what your name is) she seemed to be a Genuine Human Being.
Most of the Tories sent on the media have this nasty sneer. So combine telling people that actually their lived experience is wrong actually because actually inflation is now down to 4% actually - with their natural sneer - and is it any wonder they slide towards the abyss?
You don't have that sneer. You recognise that the economic claim is a lie. But you have more brains than half their MPs put together. It's going to be brutal.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday)
I hope this ages better than some of your cricket predictions
The Daily Mail is forecasting a modest increase to 4.1 or 4.2 on the back of government briefings. I suspect that the risk is being oversold to make inflation failing to fall for the second month in a row look better than it actually is. Meantime, as some of us predicted, that first interest cut from the Bank edges slightly further away.
Not a great background for a tired and incoherent government to campaign on really. But its pretty hard to feel sorry for them.
And by the way, in the last test I forecast that England would lose by 100 runs on day 2. They lost by 106 on day 4. That's not bad.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
I am an educated (Masters' degree) young-middle aged (early 30s) guy with a decent professional job (professional role at a University). I was looking up something the other day to do some maths on what the salary of a position was relative to the nation, and I learnt that my current job is below the median individual income - I'm closer to the 40% marker. I am (in some ways) very lucky that I don't have to worry about rent (my mum dying when I was younger providing a mortgageless house I can live in at only cost of bills). I wouldn't say I'm overly frugal, but I try to put a couple of hundred quid away every month to pay for the occasional big thing every year / six months (fixing something in the house, going on holiday, buying a new laptop, etc).
I can't do what I remember my parents' doing (when they were younger than I am now) - buying a new house on a mortgage (that didn't ask for repayments in the first 6 years). They furnished that house with new furniture (granted, from Ikea, but still). We went on holiday overseas every year. I was never in want of essentials. My mum dropped out of school at 15 (got pregnant with me at 17) and my dad did his degree part time and worked. Sure, two incomes are obviously going to go further than just my one, but they also had to pay for a child. And they seemed to have it much easier than I do; let alone getting into examples of my peers who did not have a house to move in to and are renting / trying to get mortgages.
Stagnating wages are a huge problem - and something that mainly started at the period where union power was greatly decreased. The way that the prior generations were compensated was by allowing their property prices to inflate - meaning they could always be safe in the knowledge that they could turn their material asset into liquid assets, and move into bigger and more expensive properties with the knowledge they would appreciate in value. My generation does not have that opportunity.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
I think that ascribes too much agency to the 'Democratic establishment' or the 'Obama team'. Unless the candidates who dropped out agreed with that logic, they wouldn't have done so.
The same thing goes now. The idea that a 'Democratic establishment' can tell Biden to drop out is pure fantasy. Unless he decides to drop out of his own accord, he's going to run.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
And yet before other candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden, Sanders was favorite in the betting to win the nomination.
There were only a few days between the decisive South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday so it all happened very quickly.
That's true, but what I'm saying is that candidates dropped out days before Super Tuesday because they didn't want Sanders to win, rather than because their campaigns didn't have enough money to carry on a few more days.
That's true. Conversely if Elizabeth Warren had dropped out before Super Tuesday then Sanders would have won a lot more states and kept up his momentum.
Nevertheless when it came down to a two-horse race, Sanders didn't do well enough. Biden beat him in 5 out of 6 states on 'Super Tuesday 2'.
If the only alternative to Biden people can come up with is Michelle Obama, them Biden will be the Democratic nominee.
The fact that people are still talking about Michelle Obama reveals a lack of seriousness on the Democrat side which is inexcusable given the stakes. There are plenty of potential alternatives for nominee who are at least possible and plausible - Harris, Whitmer, Warnock, Newsom.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
I am an educated (Masters' degree) young-middle aged (early 30s) guy with a decent professional job (professional role at a University). I was looking up something the other day to do some maths on what the salary of a position was relative to the nation, and I learnt that my current job is below the median individual income - I'm closer to the 40% marker. I am (in some ways) very lucky that I don't have to worry about rent (my mum dying when I was younger providing a mortgageless house I can live in at only cost of bills). I wouldn't say I'm overly frugal, but I try to put a couple of hundred quid away every month to pay for the occasional big thing every year / six months (fixing something in the house, going on holiday, buying a new laptop, etc).
I can't do what I remember my parents' doing (when they were younger than I am now) - buying a new house on a mortgage (that didn't ask for repayments in the first 6 years). They furnished that house with new furniture (granted, from Ikea, but still). We went on holiday overseas every year. I was never in want of essentials. My mum dropped out of school at 15 (got pregnant with me at 17) and my dad did his degree part time and worked. Sure, two incomes are obviously going to go further than just my one, but they also had to pay for a child. And they seemed to have it much easier than I do; let alone getting into examples of my peers who did not have a house to move in to and are renting / trying to get mortgages.
Stagnating wages are a huge problem - and something that mainly started at the period where union power was greatly decreased. The way that the prior generations were compensated was by allowing their property prices to inflate - meaning they could always be safe in the knowledge that they could turn their material asset into liquid assets, and move into bigger and more expensive properties with the knowledge they would appreciate in value. My generation does not have that opportunity.
Sorry for your loss of your mother.
On the financial side, iirc You're in London - so that's worth about £40k p.a. pretax salary or I think ? (2200/0.65) * 12
Edit: More wealth wise - calculating in terms of rent not payable though..
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
If the only alternative to Biden people can come up with is Michelle Obama, them Biden will be the Democratic nominee.
The fact that people are still talking about Michelle Obama reveals a lack of seriousness on the Democrat side which is inexcusable given the stakes. There are plenty of potential alternatives for nominee who are at least possible and plausible - Harris, Whitmer, Warnock, Newsom.
It's the GOP that are talking about Michelle Obama. Which does indeed betray a lack of seriousness.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
Yes - you probably put it better than I did. Though I believe it was possible to get a majority of elected delegates with a plurality of the vote, if you look at how delegates were awarded.
‘No downsides, only considerable upsides’, part 94:
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
It's just his usual passive aggressive 'I'm the victim here' schtick.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
I am an educated (Masters' degree) young-middle aged (early 30s) guy with a decent professional job (professional role at a University). I was looking up something the other day to do some maths on what the salary of a position was relative to the nation, and I learnt that my current job is below the median individual income - I'm closer to the 40% marker. I am (in some ways) very lucky that I don't have to worry about rent (my mum dying when I was younger providing a mortgageless house I can live in at only cost of bills). I wouldn't say I'm overly frugal, but I try to put a couple of hundred quid away every month to pay for the occasional big thing every year / six months (fixing something in the house, going on holiday, buying a new laptop, etc).
I can't do what I remember my parents' doing (when they were younger than I am now) - buying a new house on a mortgage (that didn't ask for repayments in the first 6 years). They furnished that house with new furniture (granted, from Ikea, but still). We went on holiday overseas every year. I was never in want of essentials. My mum dropped out of school at 15 (got pregnant with me at 17) and my dad did his degree part time and worked. Sure, two incomes are obviously going to go further than just my one, but they also had to pay for a child. And they seemed to have it much easier than I do; let alone getting into examples of my peers who did not have a house to move in to and are renting / trying to get mortgages.
Stagnating wages are a huge problem - and something that mainly started at the period where union power was greatly decreased. The way that the prior generations were compensated was by allowing their property prices to inflate - meaning they could always be safe in the knowledge that they could turn their material asset into liquid assets, and move into bigger and more expensive properties with the knowledge they would appreciate in value. My generation does not have that opportunity.
I broadly agree with what I think your point is: in the early 80s, someone on an unspectacular but solid salary - a teacher, say, or@148grss - could afford to buy and live in an unspectacular but solid house - a three bed semi in Timperley is always my yardstick - on a single salary. To me, that is the economic outcome we should be aiming for and measuring ourselves against.
I don't think allowing house prices to inflate is at all helpful in that regard though, particularly if what you want is to move into a bigger house. If you want to move from your three bed semi in Timperley to a four bed detached in HaleBarns, if your house has inflated in value by 50%, the bigger house will also have inflated by 50% and be further away from you in absolute terms.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
Yes, I'm seeing a lot of that in the rural/suburban seats where I have an interest, where interest in Labour has boomed over the last year, as has Green support - LibDem support seems broadly stationary. Some of it is due to a gradual influx of middle-class voters from the cities, used to voting Labour if they don't vote Tory, unless they are very left-wing in which case they vote Green.
But partly it's simply the national swing. As we know, Labour is up about 15 points, Tories down by a similar amount, and LibDems down by a couple of points. Country-dwellers swing like everyone else, by and large. An additional factor is that there comes a point where the tactical voting argument switches from LibDem to Labour, as we saw in mid-Beds, but it's hard for voters to know whether that's true in their particular constituency, especially in a GE. If I was a LibDem I'd concentrate on 15-20 target seats in seats like Guildford with less ex-urban migration = if they go for 30-40 gains they may end up with half a dozen. Labour also has choices to make - one of the seats is now a Labour target - and the Greens seem to have opted for trying to get 5-10% everywhere rather than focus on a couple of gains.
The Gaza war is the fault of Hamas, but the innocent are dying and it is beyond time for the killing to end
n January 29, the Palestinian emergency services received a call from a six-year old girl called Hind Rajab, who said she was trapped in a car with her family and a tank was rolling towards them. “Will you come and get me?” she asked. “I’m so scared.”
It took nearly two weeks for officials to reach the area, sealed off as an active combat zone, to find Hind dead along with several members of her family. Their car was riddled with bullets. Nearby were the burnt-out remains of an ambulance sent to help.
When Israel was attacked on October 7, all people of sanity and compassion condemned it as a modern-day pogrom. Israel had to restore its security and get its hostages back.
But the conflict is now in its fifth month; the outcome is desperately uncertain. The mortality figures from the Hamas-run authority might be disputed, but when you invade a territory of 2.3 million people crowded into 139 square miles, it’s easy to believe that around 25,000 will die – and what journalists can’t report because we’re mostly barred from entry, we can see on footage uploaded on the internet. Houses, shops, mosques flattened; bodies crushed beneath rubble.
I don't support either side, and like the rest of humanity am 100% on the side of 6 year old girls with no exceptions. Would it not have been a good idea, rather before this happened, for Hamas to surrender, and for Palestinians to allow a group of reasonably honest brokers (all politics is relative) - Saudis, EU, Turkey, USA, Norway, Jordan, Egypt for example, to assist in a comprehensive negotiation.
I cannot see what the non surrender of Hamas is now achieving for Palestinians. It would be different if their allies had fully joined in - they have plenty - but critically they have not.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
Yep. Paper economy vs real economy. Even your "inflation is now down to 4%" is only paper. In reality prices are up 20-30% from not very long ago, they're still going up (slowly), and wages have risen by very little if at all.
Where a beating for the Tories is in danger of becoming a rout is when they send out muppets like the Chief Secretary to insist the sky is green because thats what it says on my script. And to be fair to (sorry, have no clue what your name is) she seemed to be a Genuine Human Being.
Most of the Tories sent on the media have this nasty sneer. So combine telling people that actually their lived experience is wrong actually because actually inflation is now down to 4% actually - with their natural sneer - and is it any wonder they slide towards the abyss?
You don't have that sneer. You recognise that the economic claim is a lie. But you have more brains than half their MPs put together. It's going to be brutal.
Some people are doing personally worse than the average ONS price and wage increases and some better.
The number doing better will increase this year and the number doing worse will fall.
That's the way it always works with price shocks needing to work through the system.
Or in the bigger picture that workers in some sectors and jobs have done better than in others.
Not to mention that when comparing price and wage increases the amount of government handouts ** rarely seems included.
How many people have already forgotten about the £400 energy subsidy of last winter or the council tax rebate which proceeded it ?
** Not a freebie but a payment which will lead to higher taxes in future years.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
If you're taking about a pay rise with nothing else changing, then yes.
But there's a different effect, which is the one I'm thinking of. There are lots of sectors - education is the one I know about, but broadly anything that has "vocation" attached to it applies- where it's not financially rational for anyone to do it. Every maths teacher could make more in finance. Every TA could make more and experience less hassle, in a supermarket.
Such people used to be considered good, valuable people. It's not entirely selfless, it's also how individuals balance the tangible and intangible rewards of work. But a combination of a decade plus pay squeeze and broader cultural stuff means that balance isn't working any more.
As I posted upthread, Thatcherism.
To consider a word. Thatcherism.
Why were people called Thatcher?
Because in the Goode Olde days, doing the job of your father was pretty much it. So you inherited the family trade. People coped with the nearly complete absence of opportunity by saying that other things “were not for the likes of us”. Even being aggressive to those tiny number who “betrayed their class” and moved up.
The world changed with meritocracy. To an extent. The Old Upper 10,000 has given way to the New Upper 10,000. Oxbridge has given way to a much wider range of universities giving entry to the top of society.
Those with ambition and quite minor initial advantages can realistically have a go at anything. The Hindu son of a couple who ran a pharmacy can become PM.
The flip side of that is that many more people see that aspiration and don’t think “that’s not for the likes of us”. They want more and think it is not unreasonable for them to get it.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
Yes, I'm seeing a lot of that in the rural/suburban seats where I have an interest, where interest in Labour has boomed over the last year, as has Green support - LibDem support seems broadly stationary. Some of it is due to a gradual influx of middle-class voters from the cities, used to voting Labour if they don't vote Tory, unless they are very left-wing in which case they vote Green.
But partly it's simply the national swing. As we know, Labour is up about 15 points, Tories down by a similar amount, and LibDems down by a couple of points. Country-dwellers swing like everyone else, by and large. An additional factor is that there comes a point where the tactical voting argument switches from LibDem to Labour, as we saw in mid-Beds, but it's hard for voters to know whether that's true in their particular constituency, especially in a GE. If I was a LibDem I'd concentrate on 15-20 target seats in seats like Guildford with less ex-urban migration = if they go for 30-40 gains they may end up with half a dozen. Labour also has choices to make - one of the seats is now a Labour target - and the Greens seem to have opted for trying to get 5-10% everywhere rather than focus on a couple of gains.
Question for the Lib Dems (and anyone watching them) is how many sinks do they have to throw at individual constituencies? That's probably too fine-grained for an MRP or blue wall poll to pick up.
I suspect that, by now, it ought to be pretty obvious where such sinks are located.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Back in my day ( 1970s). We had kids at school who were living in council houses with one working parent who were genuinely poor.
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
I am an educated (Masters' degree) young-middle aged (early 30s) guy with a decent professional job (professional role at a University). I was looking up something the other day to do some maths on what the salary of a position was relative to the nation, and I learnt that my current job is below the median individual income - I'm closer to the 40% marker. I am (in some ways) very lucky that I don't have to worry about rent (my mum dying when I was younger providing a mortgageless house I can live in at only cost of bills). I wouldn't say I'm overly frugal, but I try to put a couple of hundred quid away every month to pay for the occasional big thing every year / six months (fixing something in the house, going on holiday, buying a new laptop, etc).
I can't do what I remember my parents' doing (when they were younger than I am now) - buying a new house on a mortgage (that didn't ask for repayments in the first 6 years). They furnished that house with new furniture (granted, from Ikea, but still). We went on holiday overseas every year. I was never in want of essentials. My mum dropped out of school at 15 (got pregnant with me at 17) and my dad did his degree part time and worked. Sure, two incomes are obviously going to go further than just my one, but they also had to pay for a child. And they seemed to have it much easier than I do; let alone getting into examples of my peers who did not have a house to move in to and are renting / trying to get mortgages.
Stagnating wages are a huge problem - and something that mainly started at the period where union power was greatly decreased. The way that the prior generations were compensated was by allowing their property prices to inflate - meaning they could always be safe in the knowledge that they could turn their material asset into liquid assets, and move into bigger and more expensive properties with the knowledge they would appreciate in value. My generation does not have that opportunity.
Sorry for your loss of your mother.
On the financial side, iirc You're in London - so that's worth about £40k p.a. pretax salary or I think ? (2200/0.65) * 12
Edit: More wealth wise - calculating in terms of rent not payable though..
Just outside of London - Hertfordshire. And mum passed when I was a kid, it's a long time ago now. I think last pay day was my first post tax salary that hit / was slightly over £2k.
Whenever wages or the cost of living get mentioned, the right get all huffy. We're no longer in the age of hair shirts - unless you are in the bottom decide (and we'll come back to them in a minute).
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.
Do you mean the Territorial Army?
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
Yep. Paper economy vs real economy. Even your "inflation is now down to 4%" is only paper. In reality prices are up 20-30% from not very long ago, they're still going up (slowly), and wages have risen by very little if at all.
Where a beating for the Tories is in danger of becoming a rout is when they send out muppets like the Chief Secretary to insist the sky is green because thats what it says on my script. And to be fair to (sorry, have no clue what your name is) she seemed to be a Genuine Human Being.
Most of the Tories sent on the media have this nasty sneer. So combine telling people that actually their lived experience is wrong actually because actually inflation is now down to 4% actually - with their natural sneer - and is it any wonder they slide towards the abyss?
You don't have that sneer. You recognise that the economic claim is a lie. But you have more brains than half their MPs put together. It's going to be brutal.
Victoria Atkins (a Cambridge-educated lawyer btw). As an aside, I think her performance the other day was also yet another exemplar of the lack of intellectual curiosity that leads to ignorance. She is not an idiot but she is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury so should by now understand debt and gdp just as a Northern Ireland Secretary should know that Republican and Loyalist communities vote for different parties, a Trade Secretary should know which ports carry goods between here and France, a Culture Secretary should understand online encryption, and a Transport Secretary should know ferry companies need big boats called ferries.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I think the final paragraph was a worst case scenario of Chinese invasion and occupation of the US (presumably on the west coast) after a Taiwan blockade by China, the US sending carriers which China attacks and the US supporting Japanese attacks on Chinese air and missile bases.
Hence the penultimate paragraph 'Speaking for myself, I would loathe nothing more than to walk around New York or San Francisco with my eyes half-closed, to avoid noticing the telltale signs of CCP surveillance."
For us and Europe the biggest threat we face is from Putin's Russia, for the US however the biggest threat they face is from Xi's China
If the only alternative to Biden people can come up with is Michelle Obama, them Biden will be the Democratic nominee.
The fact that people are still talking about Michelle Obama reveals a lack of seriousness on the Democrat side which is inexcusable given the stakes. There are plenty of potential alternatives for nominee who are at least possible and plausible - Harris, Whitmer, Warnock, Newsom.
It's not a lack of seriousness on the Democrat side because it's not Democrats talking about this! It's a gossip columnist from a right-wing tabloid, a bunch of right-wing crypto enthusiasts and, apparently, Mike Smithson.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
The Gaza war is the fault of Hamas, but the innocent are dying and it is beyond time for the killing to end
n January 29, the Palestinian emergency services received a call from a six-year old girl called Hind Rajab, who said she was trapped in a car with her family and a tank was rolling towards them. “Will you come and get me?” she asked. “I’m so scared.”
It took nearly two weeks for officials to reach the area, sealed off as an active combat zone, to find Hind dead along with several members of her family. Their car was riddled with bullets. Nearby were the burnt-out remains of an ambulance sent to help.
When Israel was attacked on October 7, all people of sanity and compassion condemned it as a modern-day pogrom. Israel had to restore its security and get its hostages back.
But the conflict is now in its fifth month; the outcome is desperately uncertain. The mortality figures from the Hamas-run authority might be disputed, but when you invade a territory of 2.3 million people crowded into 139 square miles, it’s easy to believe that around 25,000 will die – and what journalists can’t report because we’re mostly barred from entry, we can see on footage uploaded on the internet. Houses, shops, mosques flattened; bodies crushed beneath rubble.
I don't support either side, and like the rest of humanity am 100% on the side of 6 year old girls with no exceptions. Would it not have been a good idea, rather before this happened, for Hamas to surrender, and for Palestinians to allow a group of reasonably honest brokers (all politics is relative) - Saudis, EU, Turkey, USA, Norway, Jordan, Egypt for example, to assist in a comprehensive negotiation.
I cannot see what the non surrender of Hamas is now achieving for Palestinians. It would be different if their allies had fully joined in - they have plenty - but critically they have not.
Hamas do not care about Palestinians.
Really? I guess all those folk on here saying that Hamas care about Palestinians must feel right eejits.
‘No downsides, only considerable upsides’, part 94:
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
The UK has full employment and no shortage of immigrants.
Perhaps they think the public sector would have become magically more productive if the UK was in the EU compared with what it was when the UK was in the EU.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
Germany did not realise that that the conquest of Western Europe, at a cost of 50,000 dead, was a fluke. The casualties in the USSR were the norm.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
Though should be remembered in these 'rural' parliamentary seats it will be the towns swinging to Labour which would enable them to gain the parliamentary seat, the actual rural villages and hamlets would largely stay Conservative
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
As in the 1930's, a lot of people just succumb to wishful thinking. If we let face eating leapords go after other people, they won't eventually eat our faces. The predominant human characteristic is stupidity.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
I think that ascribes too much agency to the 'Democratic establishment' or the 'Obama team'. Unless the candidates who dropped out agreed with that logic, they wouldn't have done so.
The same thing goes now. The idea that a 'Democratic establishment' can tell Biden to drop out is pure fantasy. Unless he decides to drop out of his own accord, he's going to run.
There is an entire political theory in the US of party establishment power called "The Party Decides". This theory seemed to hold quite well until the relatively recent influx of mass amounts of outside money, and has seemed to hit the GOP worse than the Democratic Party.
Again, it was well established at the time that Obama-world was doing lots of calls ahead of Super Tuesday and helped convince Mayor Pete and Klobachar to drop out and endorse at the same time.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
As in the 1930's, a lot of people just succumb to wishful thinking. If we let face eating leapords go after other people, they won't eventually eat our faces. The predominant human characteristic is stupidity.
It certainly is. What would you suggest we do in order to avoid the west losing.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In recent weeks there seems to be a nostalgia for a 'dignity of modest living' which includes supporting a family on one average wage and owning a four bedroom home in southern England.
Its perhaps the PB equivalent of Monty Python's Yorkshiremen.
Victoria Atkins (a Cambridge-educated lawyer btw). As an aside, I think her performance the other day was also yet another exemplar of the lack of intellectual curiosity that leads to ignorance. She is not an idiot but she is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury so should by now understand debt and gdp just as a Northern Ireland Secretary should know that Republican and Loyalist communities vote for different parties, a Trade Secretary should know which ports carry goods between here and France, a Culture Secretary should understand online encryption, and a Transport Secretary should know ferry companies need big boats called ferries.
There has been comment recently on the SNP mafia currently "governing" Scotland. Several ministers, including Yousless himself, have almost no experience outside supporting and working for the party.
The question here is it is worse to have no Real World experience, and be rubbish at your political job, or to have had a real job of some kind, and still be rubbish at your political job?
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
I think that ascribes too much agency to the 'Democratic establishment' or the 'Obama team'. Unless the candidates who dropped out agreed with that logic, they wouldn't have done so.
The same thing goes now. The idea that a 'Democratic establishment' can tell Biden to drop out is pure fantasy. Unless he decides to drop out of his own accord, he's going to run.
There is an entire political theory in the US of party establishment power called "The Party Decides". This theory seemed to hold quite well until the relatively recent influx of mass amounts of outside money, and has seemed to hit the GOP worse than the Democratic Party.
Again, it was well established at the time that Obama-world was doing lots of calls ahead of Super Tuesday and helped convince Mayor Pete and Klobachar to drop out and endorse at the same time.
President Trump asserted Monday that the Democratic primary is “rigged” against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and speculated that candidates who had dropped out of the race had done so in exchange for positions in a Democratic presidential administration.
"We want you, we want you, we want you. I think you know by now. We'll get you to stand somehow."
Is this the refrain playing in the minds of senior Democrats as Joe struggles to look credible for a 2nd term? Could be. Wow, just imagine. Michelle Obama.
Still, it seems unlikely. It was value a while back at 120 (which I did) but at current prices it looks a professional sell, amateur buy.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In my experience, it's inheritance disputes where people reveal their true natures.
The Gaza war is the fault of Hamas, but the innocent are dying and it is beyond time for the killing to end
n January 29, the Palestinian emergency services received a call from a six-year old girl called Hind Rajab, who said she was trapped in a car with her family and a tank was rolling towards them. “Will you come and get me?” she asked. “I’m so scared.”
It took nearly two weeks for officials to reach the area, sealed off as an active combat zone, to find Hind dead along with several members of her family. Their car was riddled with bullets. Nearby were the burnt-out remains of an ambulance sent to help.
When Israel was attacked on October 7, all people of sanity and compassion condemned it as a modern-day pogrom. Israel had to restore its security and get its hostages back.
But the conflict is now in its fifth month; the outcome is desperately uncertain. The mortality figures from the Hamas-run authority might be disputed, but when you invade a territory of 2.3 million people crowded into 139 square miles, it’s easy to believe that around 25,000 will die – and what journalists can’t report because we’re mostly barred from entry, we can see on footage uploaded on the internet. Houses, shops, mosques flattened; bodies crushed beneath rubble.
I don't support either side, and like the rest of humanity am 100% on the side of 6 year old girls with no exceptions. Would it not have been a good idea, rather before this happened, for Hamas to surrender, and for Palestinians to allow a group of reasonably honest brokers (all politics is relative) - Saudis, EU, Turkey, USA, Norway, Jordan, Egypt for example, to assist in a comprehensive negotiation.
I cannot see what the non surrender of Hamas is now achieving for Palestinians. It would be different if their allies had fully joined in - they have plenty - but critically they have not.
Hamas do not care about Palestinians.
This is noted, as true. But that doesn't really provide much help for the 6 year old girls. Is the united combination of USA, EU, Egypt, Saudi, Jordan, Turkey, UN, Gulf States, NATO members and others sufficient to help the 6 year olds and deal with Hamas? It would be odd if they were not.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
As in the 1930's, a lot of people just succumb to wishful thinking. If we let face eating leapords go after other people, they won't eventually eat our faces. The predominant human characteristic is stupidity.
It certainly is. What would you suggest we do in order to avoid the west losing.
Boost military spending. Right now, I don't think there is any higher priority.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
As is the answer to all of the "why is Rishi losing even these voters" questions - material reality. Most people are finding life harder, and feel that services are worse. So why would anyone support the government that presided over that?
‘No downsides, only considerable upsides’, part 94:
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
The UK has full employment and no shortage of immigrants.
Perhaps they think the public sector would have become magically more productive if the UK was in the EU compared with what it was when the UK was in the EU.
Trade is a significant driver of productivity, it is well documented both in the macro data and at the firm level. By making it harder to trade, especially for smaller, fast growing firms, Brexit has harmed our growth prospects materially. Sad.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In recent weeks there seems to be a nostalgia for a 'dignity of modest living' which includes supporting a family on one average wage and owning a four bedroom home in southern England.
Its perhaps the PB equivalent of Monty Python's Yorkshiremen.
Don't know if you're referring to my post, but I didn't grow up anywhere near southern England, and my parents certainly couldn't have afforded a 4 bedroom house down here.
Isn't it a bit of a myth that Democrats coalesced on Biden last time because they thought he was the best (or only) person to defeat Trump? As I remember, everyone else gave up and endorsed Biden because they didn't want Sanders to win the nomination. Sanders was also too old and, like Biden, shouldn't have been running in 2020. We're in a mess because of the egos of people in their seventies who should have made way for younger people (with less name recognition of course), and the weakness of political parties in the USA.
What happened was that there were a load of moderate candidates none of whom got an overwhelming lead in Iowa and NH, and then they got to the first state with black people and they overwhelmingly went for Biden. You can't win a Democratic primary with just white moderates because there aren't enough of them, so all the other moderates dropped out and backed Biden. Bernie Sanders never had a strategy to reach more than 1/3 of the primary electorate so that was that.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
The other candidates dropped out before Super Tuesday because Sanders was leading the polls in most Super Tuesday states. Biden was chosen as the "stop Sanders" candidate rather than the stop Trump candidate.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
He wasn't "chosen". The other candidates didn't have a path to win. The closest was Buttigieg but he had at best half the white moderates and hardly any black people, which isn't enough.
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
I mean it was clear that the other candidates dropped out and backed Biden at the behest of the Obama team because they didn't want Bernie to win and, to them, Biden was the only person able to coalesce the party and beat Bernie. This was well documented at the time. Bernie's plan seemed to be similar to Trump's in 2016 - a large field would split the votes and Bernie would be able to be first or second in many primaries and take a plurality of the delegates and use that plurality as an argument for other delegates backing him.
I think that ascribes too much agency to the 'Democratic establishment' or the 'Obama team'. Unless the candidates who dropped out agreed with that logic, they wouldn't have done so.
The same thing goes now. The idea that a 'Democratic establishment' can tell Biden to drop out is pure fantasy. Unless he decides to drop out of his own accord, he's going to run.
There is an entire political theory in the US of party establishment power called "The Party Decides". This theory seemed to hold quite well until the relatively recent influx of mass amounts of outside money, and has seemed to hit the GOP worse than the Democratic Party.
Again, it was well established at the time that Obama-world was doing lots of calls ahead of Super Tuesday and helped convince Mayor Pete and Klobachar to drop out and endorse at the same time.
I've no doubt they were making phone calls. But I think you're confusing agreement on broad principles with some sort of central control, which doesn't exist.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In my experience, it's inheritance disputes where people reveal their true natures.
For fans of the genre, this one, Reeves v Drew 2022 is one of the absolute all time classics:
Yermakov played for the ART Giants youth team in Dusseldorf. The night before an upcoming match, on Feb. 10, he and his teammate Artem Kozachenko were reportedly attacked with knives on the street.
Yermakov died in the hospital of injuries sustained in the attack. Kozachenko remains in intensive care.
The entire ART Giants youth team reportedly spent the night in the hospital with Yermakov and Kozachenko following the attack.
According to the FBK, the young men's attackers may have been motivated by hatred against Ukraine. The players "were attacked with knives in the street simply because they were Ukrainians," the FBK said in their announcement...
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In my experience, it's inheritance disputes where people reveal their true natures.
Well said! People always say "I don't care about the money" and then when said person dies, guess what - it's about the money!
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
As in the 1930's, a lot of people just succumb to wishful thinking. If we let face eating leapords go after other people, they won't eventually eat our faces. The predominant human characteristic is stupidity.
It certainly is. What would you suggest we do in order to avoid the west losing.
Boost military spending. Right now, I don't think there is any higher priority.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
I would be in the 2% Topping, trundling along with my pittance
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In my experience, it's inheritance disputes where people reveal their true natures.
Well said! People always say "I don't care about the money" and then when said person dies, guess what - it's about the money!
It's always about the money! Or the house. Or the prized artefacts.
Yermakov played for the ART Giants youth team in Dusseldorf. The night before an upcoming match, on Feb. 10, he and his teammate Artem Kozachenko were reportedly attacked with knives on the street.
Yermakov died in the hospital of injuries sustained in the attack. Kozachenko remains in intensive care.
The entire ART Giants youth team reportedly spent the night in the hospital with Yermakov and Kozachenko following the attack.
According to the FBK, the young men's attackers may have been motivated by hatred against Ukraine. The players "were attacked with knives in the street simply because they were Ukrainians," the FBK said in their announcement...
What a horrific story
Who the F would attack Ukrainians in Germany, for being Ukrainian? Are there gangs of drunken, violent Russian emigres with knives roaming Dusseldorf?
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
I would be in the 2% Topping, trundling along with my pittance
But Malc you are a paragon of simple living and modest aspirations.
Reading through the various comments nobility of work...thatcher selfishness...modest wage for dignified work...and how there is a huge number of people who only want to get by, guv, on a frugal salary.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
In my experience, it's inheritance disputes where people reveal their true natures.
For fans of the genre, this one, Reeves v Drew 2022 is one of the absolute all time classics:
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
Germany did not realise that that the conquest of Western Europe, at a cost of 50,000 dead, was a fluke. The casualties in the USSR were the norm.
Up to a point but remember that initially the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union went remarkably well. Perhaps an alternative history might have Hitler offering Stalin terms rather than assume capturing Moscow would lead to capitulation rather than Soviet industry and government simply relocating and fighting on.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
I would be in the 2% Topping, trundling along with my pittance
Likewise, @malcolmg I am more than content with my salary
Not least because, I enjoy my job so much I would do it for nothing. Yet I am well paid for it. That is immensely satisfying, and also extremely fortunate. I give thanks for my luck, daily
When I was a kid at school I figured out that people divide into two groups in terms of work, ie in later life some kids end up getting paid to do what they do during official schooltime - maths, physics, economics, Latin - and then there are kids who end up geting paid to do what they do during playtime - kick a football, tell stories, sing a song, carve a flint
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
Yes, I'm seeing a lot of that in the rural/suburban seats where I have an interest, where interest in Labour has boomed over the last year, as has Green support - LibDem support seems broadly stationary. Some of it is due to a gradual influx of middle-class voters from the cities, used to voting Labour if they don't vote Tory, unless they are very left-wing in which case they vote Green.
But partly it's simply the national swing. As we know, Labour is up about 15 points, Tories down by a similar amount, and LibDems down by a couple of points. Country-dwellers swing like everyone else, by and large. An additional factor is that there comes a point where the tactical voting argument switches from LibDem to Labour, as we saw in mid-Beds, but it's hard for voters to know whether that's true in their particular constituency, especially in a GE. If I was a LibDem I'd concentrate on 15-20 target seats in seats like Guildford with less ex-urban migration = if they go for 30-40 gains they may end up with half a dozen. Labour also has choices to make - one of the seats is now a Labour target - and the Greens seem to have opted for trying to get 5-10% everywhere rather than focus on a couple of gains.
Question for the Lib Dems (and anyone watching them) is how many sinks do they have to throw at individual constituencies? That's probably too fine-grained for an MRP or blue wall poll to pick up.
I suspect that, by now, it ought to be pretty obvious where such sinks are located.
As I understand it the federal party has a very clear view which seats are in play. Unlike the 2019 campaign where Jo "I am a Golden God" Swinson insisted that ALL seats were in play.
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
They fancy it to be the "politics of envy" when it's actually the "politics of repugnance"
I'm not 100% sure how many people really just "seek the dignity of a modest living".
Depends on how you define "modest", I guess.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
Yeah whatever.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
I would be in the 2% Topping, trundling along with my pittance
Probably not in the 2% but I took a pay cut when I swapped contracts in October because I wanted something more interesting
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly, with the last minute win in overtime after being behind. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I though it was interesting how DJT was almost deferential toward her on Truth. He knows, even if some of his more mental outriders don't, that MAGAWorld vs The Swifties only ends one way.
He doesn't want to get on the wrong side of that Travis Kelce either, does he?
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
In the brief snippet of the Superbowl I caught he seemed to be in a right old tizzy and body slamming his own coach. I fear he may have anger issues.
isn't there a conspiracy theory that Travis Kelce is just a beard, ie a pretend boyfriend, with a celeb angle, to hide the fact Taylor Swift is actually a lesbian?
I like this theory mainly because it gives me a chance to imagine Taylor Swift being a lesbian, and doing lesbiany things, perhaps with a young Scarlet Johansson
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
No - in fact general feeling is the opposite; she didn't like being in the West Wing, was more willing than Barack to call out GOP bullshit behind closed doors, and was really upset with the unfair coverage of their daughters.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
Leon Derangement Syndrome. I'm calling it, it is a thing, you suffer from it
Not really. You seem to fall for most conspiracy theories and this one was doing the rounds before the Superbowl and the Superbowl played out the theory just as predicted. I mean it did so perfectly. To the extent that Biden even joked about it (hat tip @Nigelb). So you know - Occam's Razor. It fits your style perfectly. It is exactly the sort of argument you always use to 'prove' you are right on something.
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
Ferguson writes for effect, rather than from analysis (who does that remind us of?), but the central arguments of his piece - that we underestimate the extent to which most people go along with occupation, we underestimate the chance of geopolitical events snowballing into a major crisis, and that the memory of occupation or threat of invasion colours how that and the following generation perceive things for many decades afterwards, are all sound.
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
I'd also take issue with any of the alternative history of Germany winning WW2 as garbage, and that includes both SS-GB and Fatherland. Currently reading James Holland's excellent 'The war in the west, part 2' and it is striking just how poorly prepared Germany was for a long war. Everything was gambled on a quick win, and it worked right up to until they tried to invade the USSR. But in the Russia there was endless space and limitless men, so a quick win was never a possibility. And as for the invasion scare for the UK in 1940 - would never have succeeded. The home fleet would have massacred the pathetic cobbled together flotilla the Germans were trying to assemble.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
And yet, for all that, it took a lot of fighting, and a lot of determination to fight, to defeat Germany and win WWII.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
The West is actually stepping up production quite significantly. Supplying Ukraine is a separate matter.
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
We're two years into the war and Ukraine still has a huge shortage of artillery ammunition relative to Russia. I don't doubt that a lot has been done, but it's not enough.
Artillery is drone fodder.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
I haven't been to the front and I don't suppose you have but according to the people who have like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, this claim is very, very, extremely wrong. It's an artillery war, and the drones aren't a substitute.
I think that drones might be a substitute for artillery if they had better range, higher payloads, and were being produced in much greater numbers. So, they might be soon, but even if they were today, we're still not producing enough of them.
Things have come to a pretty pass when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on PB about what is the right strategy for Ukraine to win this war.
Has Michelle Obama ever given any indication she'd like to be POTUS?
Lets assume that - as some reports have it - she has been preparing a potential run since 2022. The DNC finally accept that Sleepy Joe is asleep and break the news to him that its in everyone's best interests if he steps off the ticket.
Michelle Obama becomes the unity candidate. Qualification for the job? She isn't Donald Trump, and she used to live at the White House.
Michelle Obama becoming President is just more proof that American democracy is broken. We've had daddy and son Presidents. We nearly had husband and wife Presidents. What next - Chelsea Clinton vs Donald Trump Junior?
Comments
By the 2000s aspirational Thatcher children had their decent hospital, decent school, a mortgage, their second hand Range Rover, and a sleeve of tattoos to show off on a modest TUI holiday. These people I suspect voted Brexit, Boris and detested the Labour Party as the high taxation party of envy. This is the cohort that has been screwed hardest by austerity. The working poor is again "a thing".
Bernie's strategy such that it was seems to have been based on the idea that several similar candidates were going to stay in the race despite having no hope of winning it, and some generous person was going to continue to fund them while they did this. That's not what happens in reality and there was never any reason to expect that it would.
There is a railway example of contract owner doing a stupid. In 2011 a fleet of new trains entered service on Stansted Express routes. Owned by an Australian financial services business, they were sold to SNCF, who set £bonkers as the lease cost.
With cheaper trains available nobody will pay £bonkers and so they sit rotting in sidings unused. We can't let contract holders insist the fee is £bonkers and let them get away with it. At least we have alternative trains that can be used. If its a PFI hospital what are they going to do if the contract is renegotiated and they don't like it?
Have I settled for "the dignity of a modest living", which isn't my phrase? I have settled for a comfortable mid level income that seems to be significantly less than those that some on this site are very keen we should all know about.
https://x.com/ftukpolitics/status/1756907209064169982?s=46
Well overdue and more akin to other countries where there’s not a disincentive to bring money into the country as there is with non dom.
See also on carried interest - that one’s a tougher technical nut to crack.
We have just had a nasty bout of inflation as a result of Covid and post Covid spending, higher energy costs and Ukraine. During such bouts people find their money doesn't go as far as it did and things they could once afford they can no longer.
Inflation is now down to 4% (and will probably stick at that on Wednesday) but real wages are rising at approximately 7%. So, on paper, people' money will go further. The problem is the sleight of hand that large scale fiscal drag is having on net wages ( @BartholomewRoberts has been good on this), a problem the reduction in NI barely touched.
So we have a situation where we have wages rising in real terms but taxes rising too so many still feel no better off. Those that have mortgages, particularly in the south where mortgages tend to be higher, are facing another major cost increase as well. The net result of this is that I do not see the government getting a lot of credit for any real increase in wages, mainly because most are not in fact receiving it. Hunt will try to sell a more positive story in 3 weeks time at the final budget for this Parliament but it is not going to be easy and people are right to be sceptical.
I remember the outrage here in 2021 when the pay of delivery drivers, supermarket workers, abattoir workers and other low paid manual workers was rapidly rising.
It seemed that only educated, middle class types were allowed to have pay rises.
Likewise farmers who refuse to pay the going rate for labour are held up to be victims instead of the exploiters they are.
Professorial pay is negotiated individually and it's possible to get paid pretty well at that level. But at most levels below, particularly in STEM, there's a big pay gap between what could be earned elsewhere and what can be had in academia. Glancing at our pay scales:
- First post-doc: £36k, progressing up to £44k
- Second level post-doc, with likely some line management or at least project management; expectation to be brining in some funding: £44k, progressing to £54k
- Third level, expected to be more or less self sufficient in funding and certainly managing projects and other people: £56k up to £64k
- Prof, self sufficient, also providing for and managing a reasonable team of people, international reputation etc: ~£70k and upwards (I know of several on >£100k)
Those are all fixe term contract posts, dependent on others' or own funding unless there's a substantial teaching element (lecturer post).A nearby medical tech company will pay graduates (so at least 3-4 years less education than the £36k post doc) ~£60k starting salary. Yet I'm still here; we have a steady supply of post-docs. It's not all about money - freedom to pursue what you are interested in and - let's be honest - the possibility of having your ego massaged by being a world expert in something makes up for some of that missed income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
In the short term the interaction between wages and inflation is more complicated and we can have periods where wages are falling in real terms, even although productivity isn't, something we have seen quite a lot over the last few years. Right now the ratio between inflation and wages is more positive but my post was trying to show that it is actually a bit more complicated than that.
Where a beating for the Tories is in danger of becoming a rout is when they send out muppets like the Chief Secretary to insist the sky is green because thats what it says on my script. And to be fair to (sorry, have no clue what your name is) she seemed to be a Genuine Human Being.
Most of the Tories sent on the media have this nasty sneer. So combine telling people that actually their lived experience is wrong actually because actually inflation is now down to 4% actually - with their natural sneer - and is it any wonder they slide towards the abyss?
You don't have that sneer. You recognise that the economic claim is a lie. But you have more brains than half their MPs put together. It's going to be brutal.
Not a great background for a tired and incoherent government to campaign on really. But its pretty hard to feel sorry for them.
And by the way, in the last test I forecast that England would lose by 100 runs on day 2. They lost by 106 on day 4. That's not bad.
How long before Leon comes on to tell us it was a fix. It went to overtime so it must be.
I can't do what I remember my parents' doing (when they were younger than I am now) - buying a new house on a mortgage (that didn't ask for repayments in the first 6 years). They furnished that house with new furniture (granted, from Ikea, but still). We went on holiday overseas every year. I was never in want of essentials. My mum dropped out of school at 15 (got pregnant with me at 17) and my dad did his degree part time and worked. Sure, two incomes are obviously going to go further than just my one, but they also had to pay for a child. And they seemed to have it much easier than I do; let alone getting into examples of my peers who did not have a house to move in to and are renting / trying to get mortgages.
Stagnating wages are a huge problem - and something that mainly started at the period where union power was greatly decreased. The way that the prior generations were compensated was by allowing their property prices to inflate - meaning they could always be safe in the knowledge that they could turn their material asset into liquid assets, and move into bigger and more expensive properties with the knowledge they would appreciate in value. My generation does not have that opportunity.
The same thing goes now. The idea that a 'Democratic establishment' can tell Biden to drop out is pure fantasy. Unless he decides to drop out of his own accord, he's going to run.
Nevertheless when it came down to a two-horse race, Sanders didn't do well enough. Biden beat him in 5 out of 6 states on 'Super Tuesday 2'.
The fact that people are still talking about Michelle Obama reveals a lack of seriousness on the Democrat side which is inexcusable given the stakes. There are plenty of potential alternatives for nominee who are at least possible and plausible - Harris, Whitmer, Warnock, Newsom.
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1756888470599967000
On the financial side, iirc You're in London - so that's worth about £40k p.a. pretax salary or I think ? (2200/0.65) * 12
Edit: More wealth wise - calculating in terms of rent not payable though..
Which does indeed betray a lack of seriousness.
’Things have come to a pretty pass when the most authoritative government response to new figures testifying to the negative economic impact of Brexit is to insist that everything could have been so very much worse. Thus Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, cited doom-laden forecasts of “inevitable decline”, which, she said, “have been proved false”.
And, yes, thank goodness, the economic meltdown predicted by some did not happen – quite, with a very near miss, and a political crisis, in relation to Northern Ireland. But the lack of a complete meltdown, either in the weeks immediately after the UK’s departure from the EU took effect, or in the four years since, can be only limited consolation in the light of the latest assessment.
The report, compiled by John Springford, an associate of the Centre for European Reform, concludes that Brexit has opened a hole of almost £100bn in annual UK exports, which is making the country worse off than if it had remained in the European Union. The estimates show that missed growth in goods and services exports means that trade is running at 30 per cent below what it could have been without Brexit…
‘Now, the Centre for European Reform is a pro-EU think tank. But Springford’s economic credentials are not in doubt, and his conclusions chime with those of other recent surveys – which have, if anything, been even more negative about the extent to which the UK’s economy has been held back by Brexit. Among the most pessimistic findings have come from Cambridge Econometrics, which found that Brexit has already cost the UK economy £140bn in lost growth...
‘There have been knock-on effects on the standard of living, with Bloomberg estimating that GDP is 4 per cent lower than it might have been, with others citing lost investment, and a nearly £500 annual hit to UK workers’ pay – compared with what might otherwise have been expected...
‘Nor is it credible to explain the losses away as being caused entirely by external factors: the Covid pandemic, for instance, or the war in Ukraine. To be sure, these “black swan” events took a heavy toll on the UK economy. But they took a toll on many economies. Germany, for instance, upended the basic premises of its whole energy sector after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The difference is that others have, for the most part, bounced back more quickly or been able to cushion individuals and families more effectively against the shocks than have the successive post-Brexit governments in the UK.
Those who forecast that by leaving the EU, the UK was committing an enormous act of entirely avoidable self-harm are vindicated…
‘A full four years after Brexit came into effect, the balance sheet is not looking good, whether it is for trade, investment, or standards of living...’
https://apple.news/AO8FIbC4NQTeU1FmW_7UDHg
I don't think allowing house prices to inflate is at all helpful in that regard though, particularly if what you want is to move into a bigger house. If you want to move from your three bed semi in Timperley to a four bed detached in HaleBarns, if your house has inflated in value by 50%, the bigger house will also have inflated by 50% and be further away from you in absolute terms.
And after failing to knock out both the UK and then the USSR, the madness of declaring war on the industrial powerhouse that was the USA.
But partly it's simply the national swing. As we know, Labour is up about 15 points, Tories down by a similar amount, and LibDems down by a couple of points. Country-dwellers swing like everyone else, by and large. An additional factor is that there comes a point where the tactical voting argument switches from LibDem to Labour, as we saw in mid-Beds, but it's hard for voters to know whether that's true in their particular constituency, especially in a GE. If I was a LibDem I'd concentrate on 15-20 target seats in seats like Guildford with less ex-urban migration = if they go for 30-40 gains they may end up with half a dozen. Labour also has choices to make - one of the seats is now a Labour target - and the Greens seem to have opted for trying to get 5-10% everywhere rather than focus on a couple of gains.
The number doing better will increase this year and the number doing worse will fall.
That's the way it always works with price shocks needing to work through the system.
Or in the bigger picture that workers in some sectors and jobs have done better than in others.
Not to mention that when comparing price and wage increases the amount of government handouts ** rarely seems included.
How many people have already forgotten about the £400 energy subsidy of last winter or the council tax rebate which proceeded it ?
** Not a freebie but a payment which will lead to higher taxes in future years.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13065937/joe-biden-democrat-panic-michelle-obama-gavin-newsom-garage-classified.html
Why were people called Thatcher?
Because in the Goode Olde days, doing the job of your father was pretty much it. So you inherited the family trade. People coped with the nearly complete absence of opportunity by saying that other things “were not for the likes of us”. Even being aggressive to those tiny number who “betrayed their class” and moved up.
The world changed with meritocracy. To an extent. The Old Upper 10,000 has given way to the New Upper 10,000. Oxbridge has given way to a much wider range of universities giving entry to the top of society.
Those with ambition and quite minor initial advantages can realistically have a go at anything. The Hindu son of a couple who ran a pharmacy can become PM.
The flip side of that is that many more people see that aspiration and don’t think “that’s not for the likes of us”. They want more and think it is not unreasonable for them to get it.
I suspect that, by now, it ought to be pretty obvious where such sinks are located.
It now looks possible, perhaps even likely, that the West as a whole lacks the determination to increase its military production to provide Ukraine with sufficient supplies to defeat Russia, instead allowing Ukraine to be defeated by the combined military and economic might of Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The West is at risk of choosing to lose. The consequences will be as bad as if the UK and US had given up in WWII, and gifted the Axis victory by an unwillingness to fight.
Reminds me of nothing more than the way people lie like flat fish on those questionnaires about poverty, charity, etc.
I'm sure we have found on PB a fantastically (rich and) untypical sample to illustrate how everyone is happy to settle for "the dignity of a modest living". Not you lot, obvs, but other people, perhaps even your parents.
I mean I know we are an out of touch skewing older skewing richer demographic but the lack of self-awareness on here is amazing.
Hence the penultimate paragraph 'Speaking for myself, I would loathe nothing more than to walk around New York or San Francisco with my eyes half-closed, to avoid noticing the telltale signs of CCP surveillance."
For us and Europe the biggest threat we face is from Putin's Russia, for the US however the biggest threat they face is from Xi's China
If Polands plans go through, for example, the Polish military would be a match for Russia, just by itself.
The UK has full employment and no shortage of immigrants.
Perhaps they think the public sector would have become magically more productive if the UK was in the EU compared with what it was when the UK was in the EU.
Again, it was well established at the time that Obama-world was doing lots of calls ahead of Super Tuesday and helped convince Mayor Pete and Klobachar to drop out and endorse at the same time.
Its perhaps the PB equivalent of Monty Python's Yorkshiremen.
The question here is it is worse to have no Real World experience, and be rubbish at your political job, or to have had a real job of some kind, and still be rubbish at your political job?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/485567-trump-claims-dem-primary-rigged-against-sanders-after-klobuchar/
President Trump asserted Monday that the Democratic primary is “rigged” against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and speculated that candidates who had dropped out of the race had done so in exchange for positions in a Democratic presidential administration.
Is this the refrain playing in the minds of senior Democrats as Joe struggles to look credible for a 2nd term? Could be. Wow, just imagine. Michelle Obama.
Still, it seems unlikely. It was value a while back at 120 (which I did) but at current prices it looks a professional sell, amateur buy.
It still has its uses with high precision ammunition but the era of heavy bombardments has gone.
But I think you're confusing agreement on broad principles with some sort of central control, which doesn't exist.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2022/159.html
https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-teen-basketball-player-stabbed-to-death-in-germany/
Seventeen-year-old basketball player Volodymyr Yermakov was killed in a street attack in Dusseldorf, Germany, the Kyiv Basketball Federation (FBK) reported Feb. 11.
Yermakov played for the ART Giants youth team in Dusseldorf. The night before an upcoming match, on Feb. 10, he and his teammate Artem Kozachenko were reportedly attacked with knives on the street.
Yermakov died in the hospital of injuries sustained in the attack. Kozachenko remains in intensive care.
The entire ART Giants youth team reportedly spent the night in the hospital with Yermakov and Kozachenko following the attack.
According to the FBK, the young men's attackers may have been motivated by hatred against Ukraine. The players "were attacked with knives in the street simply because they were Ukrainians," the FBK said in their announcement...
Guy looks like a total 'This Is What Real American Manhood Is All About' package.
Who the F would attack Ukrainians in Germany, for being Ukrainian? Are there gangs of drunken, violent Russian emigres with knives roaming Dusseldorf?
Doesn't add up
@BrianSpanner1
When you try and get a scone at Edinburgh Castle.
https://www.wilberforce.co.uk/pdf/ARTICLE-Baynes-v-Hedger-anor-a-lesson-for-charities-EC-October-2009.pdf
It had everything. A lesbian love triangle, a grasping daughter, and equally grasping charities.
Not least because, I enjoy my job so much I would do it for nothing. Yet I am well paid for it. That is immensely satisfying, and also extremely fortunate. I give thanks for my luck, daily
When I was a kid at school I figured out that people divide into two groups in terms of work, ie in later life some kids end up getting paid to do what they do during official schooltime - maths, physics, economics, Latin - and then there are kids who end up geting paid to do what they do during playtime - kick a football, tell stories, sing a song, carve a flint
In life, try and be in the latter group
Come on you know it is true. The Super Bowl was fixed wasn't it?
I like this theory mainly because it gives me a chance to imagine Taylor Swift being a lesbian, and doing lesbiany things, perhaps with a young Scarlet Johansson
Michelle Obama becomes the unity candidate. Qualification for the job? She isn't Donald Trump, and she used to live at the White House.
Michelle Obama becoming President is just more proof that American democracy is broken. We've had daddy and son Presidents. We nearly had husband and wife Presidents. What next - Chelsea Clinton vs Donald Trump Junior?