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Not the news Rishi wanted on double by-election day – politicalbetting.com
Not the news Rishi wanted on double by-election day – politicalbetting.com
Exclusive: Bombshell MRP poll predicts Tories will lose three-quarters of their seatsFull seat-by-seat results and map ?https://t.co/1Kg0kWRSPi
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With the economy in a technical recession and inflation set to fall sub 2% in the next few months no doubt there will be a lot of pressure on the Bank to cut rates quickly. However, that would be a mistake, for three reasons. First, the fall in inflation is driven by falling energy prices and to a lesser extent disinflation in other goods categories. Services and wage inflation by contrast are far too high and look quite sticky, suggesting that inflation is not yet on track to hit 2% sustainably. Second, what matters is not the level of growth but growth relative to the supply capacity of the economy. The extremely tight labour market (3.8% unemployment) suggests that the supply side is weak, which means the Bank can't afford to boost demand without adding to inflation. Finally, the Bank needs to be forward looking, and the PMI surveys suggest the growth outlook is already set to improve. Cutting rates too fast risks a second peak in inflation and further rate hikes in the future to bring it back down. Better to remain patient for now.
Have they been written off?
Remarkable, if true.
Two quarters of contraction of real GDP will get headlines, but maybe this is the real story 👇
💥 GDP per person dropped every quarter of 2023. It hasn't grown since Q1 2022
💥 That's 7 quarters - longest unbroken run without per capita GDP growth since records began in 1955
( Despite that and joking aside, some of TSE's stats are seriously alarming. Thanks in particular for the Andy Bruce tweet).
Rishi Sunak’s Economic Plan: Part 2
. . . . ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Lib Dems have already dubbed the economic slump “Rishi’s recession”. Politically this is a nightmare for a PM who promised to grow the economy as one of his five pledges.
Just waiting for him to call the election.
Because a councillor who loses their seat in May isn't going out to campaign in October / November so come this Autumn there will be very few people knocking on doors to encourage people to vote for Rishi and co...
They are headline seekers.
These figures will be revised up without a big press realease in a years time.
At the end of the last thread there was the suggestion that wage restraint was needed. Restraint? The price of everything shot up and has stayed up. Wages are nowhere near enough to cover the increase. People have less to spend, cash circulation drops - 7 quarters of no growth.
Labour will not have a magic wand. But the Tories just don't care about ordinary people, and many of them are too stupid to understand.
Yougov Feb 11-13th
Biden 44%
Trump 44%
Japan has been stagnant for years, but they have managed to maintain a clean, orderly, crime free, recognisably Japanese country. We have trashed the UK, our drains are backed up, no one can get a dentist, the streets are full of raging anti-Semites, and still we go nowhere in economic capacity. How is that even do-able?
The country is becoming a squat, where anyone can turn up, and shit in the corner. I guess we can console ourselves that eventually it will get so bad no one will want to come, and the Rwandans will send their asylum seekers to Newent and Wick as a deterrent
In May 2022 I predicted a 2023 recession.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/05/08/a-uk-recession-in-2022/
Rishi Sunak has failed to turn the corner on 14 years of Tory economic decline.
Britain is hit by a recession and it’s working people who will pay the price.
It's time for change. Only Labour will deliver it.
(Yes, there are external factors, and decades worth of chickens coming home to roost. It's not fair to blame this government for everything. But politics isn't fair.)
Now you can query whether Turner really cares about Ukrainian sovereignty, recognises the proxy fight as being crucial in the US retaining its hegemonic status, or whether the bill is merely useful for defence contractors - he is a creature of Lockheed Martin. But it’s a simple misunderstanding of the politics and motivations to think this is somehow a MAGA masterplan to stop the flow of military aid to Ukraine.
Perhaps a reduction to say 4% would be reasonable but if we ever go back to 0.25% something is very wrong somewhere.
2023 was a truly abysmal year for growth but that is hardly surprising given the extraordinary costs incurred in relation to energy costs and commodity costs. Such shocks previously have produced serious recessions. The prolonged period of real wage cuts leading into 2023 and persisting until Q3 was also a factor. I thought that the government's extraordinary expenditure in subsidising fuel bills would be enough to offset it but it wasn't quite.
What we need is growth driven by investment. The trimming of capital expenditure, such as HS2, to maintain current expenditure is a mistake. The difference between what Biden has managed in the US and we have managed is marked and capital spending is a major part.
Cutting NI in the last budget, rather than more capital investment, not least in housing, with multipliers was also a mistake. The Chancellor must do more to boost investment and training in the forthcoming budget. Tax cuts are really not the answer right now but I can't help feeling that is what we will get.
Blair and Brown inherited an economy growing strongly throwing off extra cash for public spending in 1997, something of a golden inheritance thanks to Major and Clark. Starmer and Reeves are not going to be nearly so fortunate. When you see the economic outlook I don't really envy them. Its not surprising she has trimmed the green spend. There is no spare cash for anything.
Whether they actually will- well, that's a very different question.
Terrible news for Sunak and an October- November election looks far more likely
The question now is what happens in the conservative part next ?
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/this-is-a-disgrace-property-expert-lashes-out-as-home-office-builds-up-stock-of-16-000-houses-for-asylum-seekers/ar-BB1ihHiu?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=5d3cdc4d09c443ff8045b73a0becb1ac&ei=25
“Winchester, Preston, North Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Waltham Forest, Portsmouth, Basingstoke are actually buying homes specifically for the purpose of housing asylum seekers”, he said.
“It has also been very heavily clustered in places where property is cheap – Hull, Bradford and Teesside. It is potentially damaging to these places because it creates ghettos which are terrible for integration.”
Test
The only good thing about that is this wicket looks flat. But I bet England, Ashwin and Bumrah between them will find a way to change that perception.
But in a stunning triumph, they haven't even done that. They chopped off the leg, and we didn't lose any weight, perhaps because all we can do now is hop around, waggling our stump, growing ever more obese
Last August, Transport for London (TfL) announced it wanted to give the routes distinct identities to make it easier for passengers to navigate the network.
The services will become known as the Lioness line; the Mildmay line; the Windrush line; the Weaver line; the Suffragette line; and the Liberty line.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68296483.amp
Makes sense practically, and Liberty for the Romford-Upminster line is neat. But I can hear blood vessels bursting form here.
1. I think we’re in danger of overcompensating for the upsurge in inflation in 2022. Long term with our declining demographics our biggest threat is Japan-style deflation. A couple of years of high wage and service sector inflation (which are largely domestic) but stable commodity and goods prices (which are globally influenced, albeit subject to FX rates) and we could have a happier population more inclined to spend.
2. To avoid the FPT curse that you just suffered, how about the author of a new header gives a 10 minute warning of new thread coming? So we can save the big posts for the new one.
"the uk is one of the most pleasant, stable and prosperous places in the world to live out one’s life."
I no longer believe this to be true
1) They were terrorists, and actually pretty nasty ones including making some attempts to kill people (fortunately very inept ones, but still);
2) They were almost all very wealthy women and didn't like poor people;
3) Despite claims to the contrary, they not only failed but actually made it somewhat less likely that women would get the vote.
Why are the Suffragists, whose long and patient campaign the Pankhursts came within an ace of wrecking altogether, ignored and a bunch of stupid posh women who did a great deal of damage elevated instead?
Baffles me.
The next government will be Bad News for middle-management spivs shuffling contracts around, and Good News for construction firms and people who do stuff. Because we won't have a choice.
This is Rishi's recession and it’s working people who will pay the price.
Guess we need more tax cuts now?!
Labour spokesperson: "Jeremy Hunt’s comments are as insulting as they are out of touch. The Conservatives’ failure to take any responsibility for Rishi’s recession show why we need an election.”
Largely we can stick them into two buckets. The smaller group do the skilled jobs we decided not to train our own people to do. Would we be better to train more doctors and nurses than raid health systems of poorer countries? Yes - but we chose not to pay for it.
The larger group do all the jobs we don't want to do. Work in factories, in warehouses, in care homes. Jobs we need but again aren't prepared to pay more for.
Lets take one strand of the latter. Most of the food we eat relies on migrant labour. In manufacturing, processing, packing and logistics. Where the companies who do these things largely make unhealthy low margins to keep the price of food in the UK relatively low compared to other places.
Why do we need food so cheap? Because despite right wing attacks our welfare system is cheap as fuck. Compare social security payments here to anywhere else in western Europe. And not just welfare - the cost of living is off the chart crazy. When food prices rise we all squeal for real reasons.
In essence mate, migrant labour is the cheap labour pool imported to keep wages down for business profits, something embedded in the 80s and never challenged since.
I am happy to start unravelling this position, but we cannot just say "foreigners go home" and replace them with nobody. We need to make these jobs pay a living wage. And you - amongst many on the right - object to that. So we get migrants...
...These and other obstacles to a truce could be swept away. Putin could recognise Zelensky and the rump Ukraine, merely by denying that he hadn’t; he could limit ‘denazification’ to a demand that Ukraine reassess its official tolerance of the minority cult of actual-Nazi-tainted historical figures like Stepan Bandera; and get his tame parliament to re-tweak the constitution using different boundaries. But a settlement would mean drawing a line between his conquests so far and his hopes to dominate the whole of Ukraine by some mixture of subjugation and international consent. There is no hint that he’s ready to do this...
But Russian imperialists are used to seeing contradiction as dialectic, I guess.
So school history tells that Suffragettes got the vote for women, although it took a war and that they were given the vote afterwards 'as a prize.' Because we can't have Tory voters getting nice things for underprivileged groups.
It's bullshit but it's gone mainstream for fifty years so as @bondegezou says it's a war that's been lost.
(As an aside, most people forget it was actually Conservative votes that passed votes for women through the Commons - although there were some opponents, Labour and the Liberals were both just as split on the issue. That even includes several historians, one of whom really got ratty with me when I pointed out a Tory government was in power in 1928.)
The Tories currently deserve a Canada 1993 style election result so I wouldn't rule out the MRP.
This is the housing stock they are buying up. For a fiver.
It's good to see people pay more attention to the GDP per capita figures, but a shame that they're so awful.
Real wage growth should be happening and when the labour market is tight (at 3.8% unemployment) then real wage growth should be going strong to encourage afford better living standards, while eliminating less efficient jobs that demand labour.
That's simply supply and demand working as it should, if we have strong wage growth at a time of limited unemployment.
***Waves from my Ivory Tower***
1) Inflation has been running at well below 2% pa on a month-on-month basis for two thirds of a year.
2) Services and wage inflation have a lag to headline inflation rates. If you wait for them to get down to target you could be in deflation for headline inflation.
3) Energy (gas) prices will continue to fall from here, as the price cap catches up with market prices that have gone back to close to pre-Ukraine levels. That will further push inflation down.
4) Even if we're generous and assume inflation is running at 2% pa,rather than below, that means we have positive real rates of +3% for an economy in recession (or close to). That seems unnecessarily restrictive.
So I think we should commence cuts this spring, albeit there's probably a limit to how aggressive we can be with cuts given the US economy is much stronger and so may go slower (and don't want FX moves to lead to imported inflation).
Or did your legendary modesty lead you to tone it down a bit?
Meta’s LLM for software testing work is super exciting.
This paper describes Meta’s TestGen-LLM tool, which uses LLMs to automatically improve existing human-written tests. TestGen-LLM verifies that its generated test classes successfully clear a set of filters that assure measurable improvement over the original test suite, thereby eliminating problems due to LLM hallucination. We describe the deployment of TestGen-LLM at Meta test-a-thons for the Instagram and Facebook platforms. In an evaluation on Reels and Stories products for Instagram, 75% of TestGen-LLM’s test cases built correctly, 57% passed reliably, and 25% increased coverage. During Meta’s Instagram and Facebook test-a-thons, it improved 11.5% of all classes to which it was applied, with 73% of its recommendations being accepted for production deployment by Meta software engineers. We believe this is the first report on industrial scale deployment of LLM-generated code backed by such assurances of code improvement.
https://twitter.com/nathanbenaich/status/1758036247115608317
When people ask themselves, as they often do ahead of an election: do they feel better off than they were a year or two ago?
…they now have a statistical answer: No.
GDP per head in Q4 2023 was lower than in Q4 2022 or Q4 2021.
That’s grim. Grimmer than headline GDP suggests.
As you know I’m pro immigration but there’s no denying that successive governments have covered up for a lack of infrastructure spending and investing in skills by using immigration to pad the GDP figures .
You’re right to highlight GDP per capita because that’s the figure which tells the true story .
Also, Britain seems to have reached full employment by, for example, replacing x high-paying export-earning jobs in pharmaceuticals production, with 2x low-paying imports-distributing jobs in warehouses. That seems to be why there is full employment, but awful productivity figures, awful GDP figures, awful trade figures, etc.
For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished
https://twitter.com/AllisterHeath/status/1757870203571200474
If - as an example - we bring an urgent care service back into the NHS you get the same facility and the same staff providing the same service. But you don't pay another company a load of admin staff to administer it, you don't need NHS-paid contract managers and lawyers etc etc etc.
This is how we pay record amounts for an NHS where front line healthcare is starved of cash. All the money is being syphoned away.