Slightly better news for the Conservatives with Deltapoll
Labour 41%, Con 27% Lib Dem 9% Reform 12%.
Lab lead by 42% to 31% on forced choice.
The forced choice is perhaps the most interesting.
I can't work out what's going on, other than Reform seem to fairly consistently underperform their polling in real elections.
There are all sorts of adjustments made my polling companies on weighted turnout and presumed turnout. One will be wrong, but I don't know which.
My gut tells me that due to the high numbers DKs and general lack of enthusiasm all round - other than a desire to eject the Tories - the campaign will be important in making the difference between a defeat and a total rout.
We know that historically the pollsters have often overestimated Labour, especially when the Tories are unpopular.
I think the polls that put Con in the upper twenties and Lab in the low forties are probably closer to the reality but time will tell.
I think it’s very plausible that the Tories get 29% of the vote or 19% of the vote - it depends on who turns out and actually votes on the day
The problem for the Tory party is that Labour are very carefully avoiding anything that could result in people actively going out and voting against Labour
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
And yet what about those poor Remain voters beaten in to submission by project Fear ? Poor confused folk frightened in to voting for something they didnt understand and in many cases against their own interests.
Oh they understood it perfectly. Pointless, negative, self-defeating, for no particular gain, and expensive. That was Brexit.
Can you now please for example list three things that are better off because we Brexited.
Sure
1. defending Ukraine 2. Covid vaccines 3. We are not in a budget clusterfuck as the EU is at present 4. and just for the record we are not being forced to slaughter the national cow herd because some bloke in Brussels thinks its a good idea.
All of which we could have done while still in the EU.
You really have nothing. Or wait. Do you actually believe that the nasty EU who appear, as you see it, to be incompetent and useless, are able to stop the mighty Brittannia from doing whatever the hell we want to do. I mean they couldn't even stop us leaving.
Dear god I'm not sure which is worse.
If you really live your day to day life thinking that being in the EU prevented us doing 99.5% of what we wanted to do (zero-rating VAT on home energy supplies I'll give you) no wonder people believe the UK is in the state it's in today.
No.
the EU took ages to get its shit together. the Covid vaccine grab is well documented, the budget clusterfuck I agree but its not a positive. and you may have noticed the farmers anger
Personally I have no great fear of the EU, even when we were in it I sort of put up with it. I think you do the usual thing of rush to an extreme and tar the opposition with your worst nightmares. A lot of things we blamed the EU for lay within our own politicians ability to do, but they were spineless and took the easy way our. The french and germans by contrast fought their corners so we have only ourselves to blame,
In a nutshell. We only have ourselves to blame. Although for some reason people chose/choose to blame the EU. It's absurd. Ukraine, Covid, all the rest we could have done what we did while a member. But as you say, we have had this strange relationship with the EU and now we've left. If people had any reasonable reason to leave I would be less irritated but they don't so I am.
That said, I am not going to spend a moment longer discussing it as we have done this enough on here.
I admire your optimism. It only takes one post to set the whole thing off again.
By and large we had done quite a good job (today) of focusing on the internal Tory politics rather than the rights and wrongs of B****t per-se. But it did rather get away from us at the end there.
Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn · 50m I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me.
We are a movement for peace — and we cannot stand by and let these disgusting and malicious lies go unchallenged.
Not before time.
It is believed that the action follows a statement made by Farage, while presenting on the GB News channel, in which he linked Corbyn to antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Note SKS was very careful in his motion to stop Jezza being a Lab Candidate at GE 2024. No mention at all of Antisemitism
This is a case that is only going to make the lawyers rich.
Looks like May 2nd is out the window on those numbers.
It'll have to be January. Tumour King is wowing the Antipodeans in October with his unique brand of testy incoherence and then we are into Season 2 of The Trump Show and then it's Christmas.
The dissolution by operation of law (as opposed to Rishi's earlier choice) in mid December means that any January election has to run the campaign over Christmas. This will not happen.
An election avoiding the Trump taint has to be by early October, preferably earlier. July or September are the options.
If Rishi wants to avoid the school holidays, July means early July, which means calling the election in mid May... just after being tonked in the local elections. September means calling the election in August, which is going to intefere badly with everyone's summer holiday.
Basically, there are no good dates after May 2nd. But the polls imply that that's also terrible.
The chess term is zugzwang.
The increase from a campaign period from 17 to 25 working days has really drawn out the campaign period.
Ted Heath was able to call an election in early February to hold it by the end of the same month. That's now impossible, and the likelihood of bank holidays and weekends can easily mean 25 days isn't 5 weeks, but is 5 weeks and so many extra days. (The latest date on Wikipedia for 28th January, which I think is correct - is because dissolution occurs on Tuesday 17th December, 5 weeks later is Wednesday 22nd January but because there are so many bloomin' bank holidays (25th, 26th December, 1st and 2nd January are all bank holidays in all or part of the UK) that the election could be as late as Tuesday 28th January).
But the point you make is very valid. Campaign periods now span at least 5 weeks, and no date is a good date anymore as something will be disrupted by campaigning.
In terms of the impact on summer holidays, relatively few Tory voters will have school-age children. It might even work to the Tories advantage to hold an election at the end of August, with most of the campaign period over the school summer holidays.
Very true, but a lot of journalists do have school age children. Try and run a late August election and I think even the Daily Mail would run a 'don't vote Conservative people. I've had my holiday cancelled' story.
Is there an option to hold it in June, say 6 June?
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
It's correct, but its better to say that a non-trivial proportion of VOTERS (leave and remain) have no idea why they are voting, nor the implications. Most people don't even bother thinking about politics until a week before the general election. Most people... yes A MAJORITY of voters, don't even think about it on the day itself. They dutifully rock up and vote Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem, or dutifully can't be bothered getting off the sofa.
7th May 2015 - in the car with a friend of my wife's (I'm in Bootle remember): "So who you voting for?" I asked. "Well, the country isn't doing so well. I blame the immigrants, and those people who claim benefits who don't deserve it...." this rant continues for several minutes whilst she basically manages to trot out the entire UKIP manifesto without actually having read it.
.... "So UKIP then?" I eventually venture.
"UKIP??? I'm voting LABOUR! I always vote Labour!"
You'd think this is unusual. I assure you it's not. More than half the people in this country will vote what they did last time/what their parents told them to do/because their great grandfather was a founding member of the Bootle Labour party.......
People don't think about their vote. They never do.
We're the nutters. Us. On this board. No one thinks about their vote except on the day itself, and even then its simply to go, "Oh I know Peter Dowd has personally been round to my house and stolen all my money, but you know, he's a good sort really. It's Bootle. I'll vote Labour."
Similarly, sat behind two youngsters on a bus in 2016.
Young un 1: 'So how are you voting tomorrow?' Young un 2. 'I'm voting Remain so we get £350m for the NHS'
Had I been involved in the campaign in any way, I would have assumed someone was playing a Josh Lymanesque joke on me....
1) They can act very fast in keeping Trump on the ballot; not so much when it comes to deciding on immunity. 2) The decision that the 14thA is not self-executing is the very opposite of the originalism which the majority regularly professes. 3) So much for "states' rights".
I think "States' Rights" means to do Republican things like banning abortion.
Whilst I disagree with the Supreme Court's position on abortion, the distinction between that and invoking the insurrectionist clause is perfectly clear.
It is entirely possible for abortion access to be much more restricted in Alabama than in Colorado based on different democratic decisions in those states. But it is simply not possible for someone to be President of the United States in Alabama but not Colorado. That is the point I have made from the very start of the discussion on this issue, and not just the conservative but also the liberal justices agreed on that.
It doesn't make "states' rights" meaningless at all. A federal system doesn't involve all decisions being devolved to states - indeed it can't, or it simply isn't a federation but 50 independent territories. There can still be wide disagreement between conservative and liberal justices over how narrowly you interpret powers given to the federal government and how widely those to state governments, without either taking an absolutist position.
This was a slam dunk for them and 9/0 on the main judgment is no surprise. However there is dissent on the detail. 4 judges think the ruling that only Congress via a specific act can ban an Insurrectionist from the presidential ballot is seat-of-the-pants and partisan.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Sky saying they will lose all the amendments in the HOL and ping pong will happen but Labour will relent as they do not want it to continue indefinitely
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Sky saying they will lose all the amendments in the HOL and ping pong will happen but Labour will relent as they do not want it to continue indefinitely
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
Labour have a difficult choice - block an insane law or watch it all fall apart when the Government fails to implement it
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
I like that term “employer of last resort”. I wonder how much research there has been on the GFC as a push/pull mechanism for European labour into the UK.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @SandyRentool feared they might do.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
It is worth noting that that doesn't necessarily mean any wage squeeze has occurred at all.
If you had 10 people earning $10, and then imported one person earning $1, then even if all the locals continued to earn exactly the same, then average wages would fall.
---
The chart does also raises an interesting question: why have German incomes continued to rise, even though - since 2016 - they have been the location to which EU immigrants from poorer nations flocked?
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Sky saying they will lose all the amendments in the HOL and ping pong will happen but Labour will relent as they do not want it to continue indefinitely
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
“The idea of jetting halfway across the world to stay for a few days in an 'eco' lodge is hilariously ridiculous.”
Why? I’m having a lovely time. It’s beautiful
Come and join me in by the waterfall for a cup of excellent Malbec. When it gets too hot you can swim in the river. Its idyllic
What’s wrong with that??
Red wine in the tropics is all wrong. You should stick to the local beer. And spirits if you must.
Dude, I’m about to take one of the strongest hallucinogens known to man with one of its most famous exponents, surrounded by a team of world class scientists (and a film crew) investigating its extraordinary, possibly paradigm-changing entheogenic qualities, I don’t need a lecture on my choice of more minor intoxicants. But thanks anyway
You're disrespecting the medicine. No good will come of this.
I have taken advice from Kunaq the ayahuasquero himself. I’m doing a short dieta
He said a cup of calming red wine is not a problem. No beer or spirits on the day tho. No red meat. No sex (I wish: there’s a beautiful English costume designer here, who keeps swimming in the waterfall, sigh).
Oh god she’s swimming again. I may have to pretend to read my simon bolivar biography
Well I'll bow to the greater authority. But have you considered the possibility that you might get more from it if instead of posting on here, you spent a little while considering what's happening in your life that makes you feel the need for such a strong, even extreme, remedy?
Er, it’s my job and I’m getting very well paid for it?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @SandyRentool feared they might do.
So in what way are the Tories the pro-growth party, either for pay or GDP?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
I like that term “employer of last resort”. I wonder how much research there has been on the GFC as a push/pull mechanism for European labour into the UK.
It will have been a massive factor: and it wasn't just Eastern Europe, it was the collapse of the Irish, Spanish and Italian economies.
Of course, it is fascinating how little median disposable incomes in France, Germany, etc were affected by the GFC and Eurozone crises.
Feb has given us 11 polls showing Lab lead's of 22-27 and the Cons between 20-23. These are dire and I believe now un-recoverable numbers, it seems pretty certain they are going down to a very significant defeat, quite possibly of 97 proportions. Although it is of course very likely that the closer the election gets numbers will stabilise with a small recovery for the Cons, I think the public mood is very much for getting them out after a long period, and that is a difficult thing to arrest once it has set in...
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
I like that term “employer of last resort”. I wonder how much research there has been on the GFC as a push/pull mechanism for European labour into the UK.
The ONS has quite an interesting breakdown showing that immigration from the original EU15 countries picked up significantly in the years after the financial crisis.
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Sky saying they will lose all the amendments in the HOL and ping pong will happen but Labour will relent as they do not want it to continue indefinitely
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
Does that work if Rishi decides to say Mayday?
It depends on timing but whilst I thought he could go for May as per @MoonRabbit I am becoming less certain as Oct/ Nov would see an Autumn statement giving Hunt another opportunity for possible tax cuts
Who knows when it will be but @Scott_xP continual assertion that Sunak has to go for May or he will be removed is more his own hope than reality
I would add that when colleagues on here say it will be worse in the Autumn how much worse could it be in reality?
It is probably more because they want Starmer in no 10 asap which is fair enough
There is something weird about the Reform % in most polls. Is it methodology?
If Reform were on 12-13% they would have beaten the LDs comfortably in Rochdale.
I don't believe their true polling is more than about 7% currently but given that they never stand in local by elections we have little other evidence.
And if my hunch is correct, does it add about 5% to the Tories, or do they all stay at home?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
My problem with Austerity was where it fell not in the need for it.
Feb has given us 11 polls showing Lab lead's of 22-27 and the Cons between 20-23. These are dire and I believe now un-recoverable numbers, it seems pretty certain they are going down to a very significant defeat, quite possibly of 97 proportions. Although it is of course very likely that the closer the election gets numbers will stabilise with a small recovery for the Cons, I think the public mood is very much for getting them out after a long period, and that is a difficult thing to arrest once it has set in...
There is very little the Tories can do or say now that will change people’s minds about them, IMHO. The only thing that may change votes is how the public react to Starmer/Labour in a campaign. If the Tories are able to sow sufficient doubt they may recover some ground. Pre-campaign, I don’t think they’ll be able to do anything. It’s all on the short campaign.
Another reason why they just need to get on with it now.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
At the end of the day, I like Michael Pettis’s theory - to which I believe you subscribe - that Britain has found itself to be a debtor nation and so, absent any contrary policy or exogenous shocks, it basically hollows out much of its productive export sector on an ongoing basis.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
My problem with Austerity was where it fell not in the need for it.
1) They can act very fast in keeping Trump on the ballot; not so much when it comes to deciding on immunity. 2) The decision that the 14thA is not self-executing is the very opposite of the originalism which the majority regularly professes. 3) So much for "states' rights".
I think "States' Rights" means to do Republican things like banning abortion.
Whilst I disagree with the Supreme Court's position on abortion, the distinction between that and invoking the insurrectionist clause is perfectly clear.
It is entirely possible for abortion access to be much more restricted in Alabama than in Colorado based on different democratic decisions in those states. But it is simply not possible for someone to be President of the United States in Alabama but not Colorado. That is the point I have made from the very start of the discussion on this issue, and not just the conservative but also the liberal justices agreed on that.
It doesn't make "states' rights" meaningless at all. A federal system doesn't involve all decisions being devolved to states - indeed it can't, or it simply isn't a federation but 50 independent territories. There can still be wide disagreement between conservative and liberal justices over how narrowly you interpret powers given to the federal government and how widely those to state governments, without either taking an absolutist position.
This was a slam dunk for them and 9/0 on the main judgment is no surprise. However there is dissent on the detail. 4 judges think the ruling that only Congress via a specific act can ban an Insurrectionist from the presidential ballot is seat-of-the-pants and partisan.
Is it "no surprise" that it was 9/0 on the main point? Plenty on here were arguing, at least up until the hearing, that the Colorado ruling was a work of genius that the liberal justices would certainly back and some conservatives may struggle to unpick. But it never was, as I did in fact explain at the time.
On dissent on the detail, you slightly misrepresent the three liberal justices' position, and certainly misrepresent Amy Coney Barrett, who gives the shortest and probably wisest opinion of the three - essentially that it's unnecessary to go beyond deciding it's obviously not possible and not intended for states to enforce this one as you can't be US President in Alabama but not Colorado.
I can see why the other five conservatives went beyond it to seek to avoid further controversy in December/January, and it's worth saying liberal justices aren't known for confining their judgments strictly to what is necessary - so there is a little whiff of hypocrisy in upbraiding the conservatives for being expansive. And I say that as someone who is onside with the liberals on most matters.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
ROFL
the old insult the voters patter. Maybe if you had tried to get them on board you would have won.
Just think Nigel Farage is smarter than you.
No. Nigel Farage is a brilliant politician who realises that stupid people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the truth.
"That" poster, for example, was deliberately stirring up anti-immigrant hatred and it worked. Does that make him smart? Smart is telling the truth.
How did this stupidity manifest itself? If such voters really were too thick to be capable of logical thought processes, surely it would have been pretty easy for Project Fear to cow them into voting Remain? Labelling those who disagree with you as stupid is rarely the preserve of the intelligent. It speaks to a sloppy and lazy lack of intellectual curiosity.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
Entrenching it was the issue. I still think the coalition did a good job with the economy. Going full Tory in 2015 with all that transpired thereafter feels to me the bad decision (one I am complicit in making).
So do all good Tories when the public finances are up shit creek, see Thatcher & Howe and Dave & George.
Sound money has gone out of fashion.
Thatcher did not put them up to levels not seen since WW2, then put them up a bit more. As much as we can surmise what she'd have done given the set of circumstances we now face, I suspect she'd have got spending under control rather than raising Corporation Tax.
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Sky saying they will lose all the amendments in the HOL and ping pong will happen but Labour will relent as they do not want it to continue indefinitely
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
I think they will manage to bundle a few refugees onto a plane to Rwanda before the election. And perhaps that will win some votes back from Reform. Convince some of those people that Rishi, despite his diminutive stature and puppyish aura, is a well-hard patriotic geezer who can't be messed with.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
My problem with Austerity was where it fell not in the need for it.
Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn · 50m I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me.
We are a movement for peace — and we cannot stand by and let these disgusting and malicious lies go unchallenged.
Perhaps as an admirer of both Corbyn and Farage, gorgeous George can sort out this unpleasantness.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
The shape of austerity- cutting capital spending in particular- didn't help.
It's one thing let everything crumble a bit for a couple of years while the economy settles. (Whether that's wise economically, I don't know. I'm thinking from the perspective of the state of all the stuff.)
Continuing that for a decade and a bit, as we've now done, leads to the consequences we see around us.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
Think Sean's so coked up he might be hallucinating lol! 😂
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn · 50m I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me.
We are a movement for peace — and we cannot stand by and let these disgusting and malicious lies go unchallenged.
Perhaps as an admirer of both Corbyn and Farage, gorgeous George can sort out this unpleasantness.
Invitation to Corbyn to join Farage for a pint on the set of GBNews?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
Implementing austerity was fine, maintaining it dogmatically several years later in the weird hope that it would somehow finally bring us back to normal was a bit bizarre. I fear the trend for young and inexperienced PMs and Chancellors leads us to one track ponies who just keep repeating the same mantra that got them quick succcess rather than much consideration of the wider economic landscape. Bring on the octogenarians.....
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
Sounds like he has met an even bigger bullshitter!
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
Good point. Once it became a policy, it became the subject of political debate - so every aspect became bitterly fought over.
Perhaps it might have been best if Osborne had made more of a show of stealing Darling's policies - repeating over and over that "we're being responsible and sticking to Labour's austerity plans for the first 3 years - yes it's hard, but we'll see it through".
A consensus (even a feigned consensus) approach might well have meant that the implementation was more successful too. Osborne said all the right things in 2010-ish about cutting entire programmes - but it mostly ended up with the same old salami slicing mistakes being repeated, at least partly because of the difficulty of getting anything more dramatic through given the contested nature of the politics.
Feb has given us 11 polls showing Lab lead's of 22-27 and the Cons between 20-23. These are dire and I believe now un-recoverable numbers, it seems pretty certain they are going down to a very significant defeat, quite possibly of 97 proportions. Although it is of course very likely that the closer the election gets numbers will stabilise with a small recovery for the Cons, I think the public mood is very much for getting them out after a long period, and that is a difficult thing to arrest once it has set in...
There is very little the Tories can do or say now that will change people’s minds about them, IMHO. The only thing that may change votes is how the public react to Starmer/Labour in a campaign. If the Tories are able to sow sufficient doubt they may recover some ground. Pre-campaign, I don’t think they’ll be able to do anything. It’s all on the short campaign.
Another reason why they just need to get on with it now.
I would agree. Even if there are some opposition misteps in the short campaign (I'm thinking Oct is looking ever more likely), I don't think there is much to be done really. The public mood is very hardened against them and getting them out now, it's very set in. Very hard to dislodge that. I don't see a route to a Con win at all. When a government is being openly hated in public, in the pub, in the queue and getting the blame there is not much you can do to shift that.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
But dubious about this chart, the decline in UK disposable incomes measured in EUR in 2008 largely reflects GBP devaluation. And net EU migration equivalent to 0.3% of UK employment each year doesn't seem close to enough to deliver a fall in living standards of that magnitude in any case.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
Feb has given us 11 polls showing Lab lead's of 22-27 and the Cons between 20-23. These are dire and I believe now un-recoverable numbers, it seems pretty certain they are going down to a very significant defeat, quite possibly of 97 proportions. Although it is of course very likely that the closer the election gets numbers will stabilise with a small recovery for the Cons, I think the public mood is very much for getting them out after a long period, and that is a difficult thing to arrest once it has set in...
There is very little the Tories can do or say now that will change people’s minds about them, IMHO. The only thing that may change votes is how the public react to Starmer/Labour in a campaign. If the Tories are able to sow sufficient doubt they may recover some ground. Pre-campaign, I don’t think they’ll be able to do anything. It’s all on the short campaign.
Another reason why they just need to get on with it now.
I would agree. Even if there are some opposition misteps in the short campaign (I'm thinking Oct is looking ever more likely), I don't think there is much to be done really. The public mood is very hardened against them and getting them out now, it's very set in. Very hard to dislodge that. I don't see a route to a Con win at all. When a government is being openly hated in public, in the pub, in the queue and getting the blame there is not much you can do to shift that.
New leader running against Rishi's record. There's no prizes for fairness in politics. The best retail offer to the public wins.
To be fair, Covid properly shat the bed. The OBR forecast our deficit to be only £35bn this year pre-Covid, and a debt-to-GDP ratio sub-75%, and that's without all the extra tax rises, and we'd also have some infrastructure spending too.
When you suddenly borrow over £650bn in extra debt, your economy shrinks by over 10% in a year, and then you have a major war and a big post inflationary bubble on the rebound - it kind of screws things up.
It's not unfeasible that without those "events" the structural deficit would have been essentially eliminated this year.
Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn · 50m I have asked my lawyers to take the first steps in commencing legal proceedings against Nigel Farage, following a highly defamatory statement about me.
We are a movement for peace — and we cannot stand by and let these disgusting and malicious lies go unchallenged.
Perhaps as an admirer of both Corbyn and Farage, gorgeous George can sort out this unpleasantness.
Can't see either backing down so he'll have to go ahead and cut the baby in half. Urgh.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
But dubious about this chart, the decline in UK disposable incomes measured in EUR in 2008 largely reflects GBP devaluation. And net EU migration equivalent to 0.3% of UK employment each year doesn't seem close to enough to deliver a fall in living standards of that magnitude in any case.
It's adjusted for PPP so I don't think the currency movement explains it.
An increase in lower-wage employment pulling the median down seems like a better explanation.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
But dubious about this chart, the decline in UK disposable incomes measured in EUR in 2008 largely reflects GBP devaluation. And net EU migration equivalent to 0.3% of UK employment each year doesn't seem close to enough to deliver a fall in living standards of that magnitude in any case.
William has become a one-man “blame immigration for everything” bot.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
Good point. Once it became a policy, it became the subject of political debate - so every aspect became bitterly fought over.
Perhaps it might have been best if Osborne had made more of a show of stealing Darling's policies - repeating over and over that "we're being responsible and sticking to Labour's austerity plans for the first 3 years - yes it's hard, but we'll see it through".
A consensus (even a feigned consensus) approach might well have meant that the implementation was more successful too. Osborne said all the right things in 2010-ish about cutting entire programmes - but it mostly ended up with the same old salami slicing mistakes being repeated, at least partly because of the difficulty of getting anything more dramatic through given the contested nature of the politics.
Last para is really important. Osborne DID make all the right noises. But in hindsight he failed quite badly to avoid salami slicing and badly hitting capex.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
!!
But this is an error. I think this must be a great niece
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
!!
But this is an error. I think this must be a great niece
Or maybe just another one of your scam identities. Have you ever been seen in the same room as Grant Shapps?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby reducing destroying future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Disclosure. I assumed it would work. I realize now it didn't because I'm a data guy and it's hard to argue with these comparison figures.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
Good point. Once it became a policy, it became the subject of political debate - so every aspect became bitterly fought over.
Perhaps it might have been best if Osborne had made more of a show of stealing Darling's policies - repeating over and over that "we're being responsible and sticking to Labour's austerity plans for the first 3 years - yes it's hard, but we'll see it through".
A consensus (even a feigned consensus) approach might well have meant that the implementation was more successful too. Osborne said all the right things in 2010-ish about cutting entire programmes - but it mostly ended up with the same old salami slicing mistakes being repeated, at least partly because of the difficulty of getting anything more dramatic through given the contested nature of the politics.
Last para is really important. Osborne DID make all the right noises. But in hindsight he failed quite badly to avoid salami slicing and badly hitting capex.
Milei has shown how to do it. You need to use a meat cleaver instead of a salami slicer.
To be fair, Covid properly shat the bed. The OBR forecast our deficit to be only £35bn this year pre-Covid, and a debt-to-GDP ratio sub-75%, and that's without all the extra tax rises, and we'd also have some infrastructure spending too.
When you suddenly borrow over £650bn in extra debt, your economy shrinks by over 10% in a year, and then you have a major war and a big post inflationary bubble on the rebound - it kind of screws things up.
It's not unfeasible that without those "events" the structural deficit would have been essentially eliminated this year.
Imagine that the Government was not indemnifying the Bank of England's losses on its QT programme. The Government would have £100bn more to play with. They are unique in sending this money to the central bank for them to make it disappear. The ECB are not selling their bonds till they reach maturity, and the US Treasury is not covering the Fed's losses on its bond sales.
It is a scandal of wilfull Government and agency incompetence of epic proportions.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
My problem with Austerity was where it fell not in the need for it.
You wouldn't have protected foreign aid?
I'm guessing, given his politics, that he'd have slashed Defence and the Home Office.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
!!
But this is an error. I think this must be a great niece
Next you will be telling us you’ve met Shakespeare’s Sister.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
It's correct, but its better to say that a non-trivial proportion of VOTERS (leave and remain) have no idea why they are voting, nor the implications. Most people don't even bother thinking about politics until a week before the general election. Most people... yes A MAJORITY of voters, don't even think about it on the day itself. They dutifully rock up and vote Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem, or dutifully can't be bothered getting off the sofa.
7th May 2015 - in the car with a friend of my wife's (I'm in Bootle remember): "So who you voting for?" I asked. "Well, the country isn't doing so well. I blame the immigrants, and those people who claim benefits who don't deserve it...." this rant continues for several minutes whilst she basically manages to trot out the entire UKIP manifesto without actually having read it.
.... "So UKIP then?" I eventually venture.
"UKIP??? I'm voting LABOUR! I always vote Labour!"
You'd think this is unusual. I assure you it's not. More than half the people in this country will vote what they did last time/what their parents told them to do/because their great grandfather was a founding member of the Bootle Labour party.......
People don't think about their vote. They never do.
We're the nutters. Us. On this board. No one thinks about their vote except on the day itself, and even then its simply to go, "Oh I know Peter Dowd has personally been round to my house and stolen all my money, but you know, he's a good sort really. It's Bootle. I'll vote Labour."
Similarly, sat behind two youngsters on a bus in 2016.
Young un 1: 'So how are you voting tomorrow?' Young un 2. 'I'm voting Remain so we get £350m for the NHS'
Had I been involved in the campaign in any way, I would have assumed someone was playing a Josh Lymanesque joke on me....
None of this is surprising or matters a bit. Why should people be interested in politics? The big point of our sort of democracy is that instead of being run by dictators or self appointed narcissists, we delegate the matters to people who have to please enough of us enough of the time, and we can and do chuck them out.
The parties that some people 'always' vote for because their great grandma did are all parties that are OK, even if they are a bit sub-optimal at times.
Politics as a direct action and engagement subject for nearly everyone is unattractive because it's boring and, crucially, takes up winter evenings in draughty church halls in the company of slightly deranged people. Even most PBers draw the line there.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
For some reason I connect those hooded eyes, long nose and high forehead - Woolf being a good example - - with Norman-descended aristocracy.
To be fair, Covid properly shat the bed. The OBR forecast our deficit to be only £35bn this year pre-Covid, and a debt-to-GDP ratio sub-75%, and that's without all the extra tax rises, and we'd also have some infrastructure spending too.
When you suddenly borrow over £650bn in extra debt, your economy shrinks by over 10% in a year, and then you have a major war and a big post inflationary bubble on the rebound - it kind of screws things up.
It's not unfeasible that without those "events" the structural deficit would have been essentially eliminated this year.
Made plenty of cash for Tories and chums though, hence the debt.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
If so, that is interesting although it should also be said we have a latent problem here with lots of unfilled jobs and underemployment.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
There is something weird about the Reform % in most polls. Is it methodology?
If Reform were on 12-13% they would have beaten the LDs comfortably in Rochdale.
I don't believe their true polling is more than about 7% currently but given that they never stand in local by elections we have little other evidence.
And if my hunch is correct, does it add about 5% to the Tories, or do they all stay at home?
Of course if Reform is the protest vote, some portion of it could end up going Lib Dem, which might help explain why the Lib Dems are doing well in locals, even where the polls say they shouldn´t be doing so.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
I dimly remember some debate along those lines at the time - maintaining employment was a deliberate policy aim, one which received consistent support across the political spectrum. The danger, it was said, was that by foregoing a certain amount of Schumpeterian creative destruction, there would necessarily be lower productivity growth in the longer term.
But nobody seriously suggested following a different course at the time, and today the full employment consensus remains unbroken. What would the alternative be, and who would be most likely to propose it?
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Ok. But you should have applied the Sniff Test before believing it. Drugs are no excuse for not applying the Sniff Test.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
Possibly one of the Bells, of whom there are several?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
If so, that is interesting although it should also be said we have a latent problem here with lots of unfilled jobs and underemployment.
That is lazy barstewarditis and over generous state benefits, why work when you can get more for doing nothing , house paid , council tax paid and a wedge to live on , and no tax, NI etc.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
But dubious about this chart, the decline in UK disposable incomes measured in EUR in 2008 largely reflects GBP devaluation. And net EU migration equivalent to 0.3% of UK employment each year doesn't seem close to enough to deliver a fall in living standards of that magnitude in any case.
It's adjusted for PPP so I don't think the currency movement explains it.
An increase in lower-wage employment pulling the median down seems like a better explanation.
The PPP adjustment doesn't mean the currency movement is irrelevant. Higher inflation as a result of the weaker pound reduced the purchasing power of UK wages. Osborne's 2010 VAT hike will have made that worse. Net migration from the EU was too small a factor and didn't change much in the years before the GFC vs after it. It cannot possibly account for what you see in the graph. You're a man with a hammer called immigration and all you can see are nails.
On the other hand, the best option for Sunak personally is to hang on. 2 years in post. Something might turn up.
If Richi tries to hang on, what will turn up is the men in grey suits with the Whisky and the pearl-handled revolver...
Maybe, but who else takes over?
All the alternatives are worse. But even if we put that to one side, who would want to do it?
Anyone expecting to hold their seat will wait until after the election rather than be the fall guy and the second shortest serving PM in history.
That leaves Penny Mordaunt, and she is too woke and not right wing enough to win by acclamation.
As I said, the easiest decision is not to decide, and that applies too to decapitating a party.
Johnson in a faustian Putin/Medvedev style pact with Mordaunt might sort of work. It's what they both should have done after Truss went.
It's not a political combo I particularly relish - they'd probably try to out-green Labour, but it might carry the day with the PCP.
That seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened...
But the fact that you've come up with this as an option shows there are no obvious possibilities to replace Sunak. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think it's very unlikely (sub 10% chance).
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, we rarely dig under the skin of that side of the ledger.
Was it really all an unsustainable boom and not "real"?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
Put it this way: if you could choose a starting point to go back with the benefit of hindsight and steer the UK towards a better outcome, I don't think 2007/8 would be the year you'd choose, but rather 10 years earlier.
To be fair, Covid properly shat the bed. The OBR forecast our deficit to be only £35bn this year pre-Covid, and a debt-to-GDP ratio sub-75%, and that's without all the extra tax rises, and we'd also have some infrastructure spending too.
When you suddenly borrow over £650bn in extra debt, your economy shrinks by over 10% in a year, and then you have a major war and a big post inflationary bubble on the rebound - it kind of screws things up.
It's not unfeasible that without those "events" the structural deficit would have been essentially eliminated this year.
The problem began with failure to so regulate the banking sector that it collapsed, followed by printing money under the false pretences of QE, followed by the further free money of 0-1% interest rates which to this day has unbalanced the entire economic system.
It's as if from 2008 the government not only paid trillions to cover gambling losses, but put trillions more free money into the betting account so that they could carry on betting.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
My problem with Austerity was where it fell not in the need for it.
You wouldn't have protected foreign aid?
I'm guessing, given his politics, that he'd have slashed Defence and the Home Office.
Things like that.
Yes re Trident. But mainly a better (imo) mix of tax rises and spending cuts. More of the first, less of the second. I think 'we're all in it together' should have been more than a soundbite.
I'm watching the news. Ken Clarke in the House of Lords now seems to have a mobility aid. He is still mentally sharp and talking more sense than the intellectual pygmies in the Cabinet.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I feel like suddenly I can't trust what Leon says.
“The idea of jetting halfway across the world to stay for a few days in an 'eco' lodge is hilariously ridiculous.”
Why? I’m having a lovely time. It’s beautiful
Come and join me in by the waterfall for a cup of excellent Malbec. When it gets too hot you can swim in the river. Its idyllic
What’s wrong with that??
Red wine in the tropics is all wrong. You should stick to the local beer. And spirits if you must.
Dude, I’m about to take one of the strongest hallucinogens known to man with one of its most famous exponents, surrounded by a team of world class scientists (and a film crew) investigating its extraordinary, possibly paradigm-changing entheogenic qualities, I don’t need a lecture on my choice of more minor intoxicants. But thanks anyway
You're disrespecting the medicine. No good will come of this.
I have taken advice from Kunaq the ayahuasquero himself. I’m doing a short dieta
He said a cup of calming red wine is not a problem. No beer or spirits on the day tho. No red meat. No sex (I wish: there’s a beautiful English costume designer here, who keeps swimming in the waterfall, sigh).
Oh god she’s swimming again. I may have to pretend to read my simon bolivar biography
Well I'll bow to the greater authority. But have you considered the possibility that you might get more from it if instead of posting on here, you spent a little while considering what's happening in your life that makes you feel the need for such a strong, even extreme, remedy?
He's going to feel inverted, and start calling himself Noel, isn't he?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, we rarely dig under the skin of that side of the ledger.
Was it really all an unsustainable boom and not "real"?
Real wage growth was sustained throughout Labour's term in office, and has stagnated throughout the Conservative's term.
Was it something Labour did?
Or shall we apply Occam's razor and consider that maybe, just maybe, the Tories are crap at managing the economy?
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I feel like suddenly I can't trust what Leon says.
I do hope the phone will be confiscated before the serious drugs start. I feel I'm not ready for Leon to tell us all he loves us.
Comments
The problem for the Tory party is that Labour are very carefully avoiding anything that could result in people actively going out and voting against Labour
Highest % of 2019 Conservative voters to say they'd vote Reform UK that we've recorded.
Westminster VI, 2019 Conservatives (3 Mar):
Conservative 48% (+1)
Reform UK 21% (+3)
Labour 15% (-1)
Other 5% (+1)
Don't Know 11% (-4)
Changes +/- 25 Feb
Ideally, of course, it would be both of them.
BREAKING: The government has suffered its first defeat in the House of Lords on its bill to rescue the Rwanda scheme.
Delay gets them closer to 19%
Young un 1: 'So how are you voting tomorrow?'
Young un 2. 'I'm voting Remain so we get £350m for the NHS'
Had I been involved in the campaign in any way, I would have assumed someone was playing a Josh Lymanesque joke on me....
Sky expects it to pass later this month and flights even by Easter
I think that may be optimistic but that is Jon Craig of Sky view
All the alternatives are worse. But even if we put that to one side, who would want to do it?
Anyone expecting to hold their seat will wait until after the election rather than be the fall guy and the second shortest serving PM in history.
That leaves Penny Mordaunt, and she is too woke and not right wing enough to win by acclamation.
As I said, the easiest decision is not to decide, and that applies too to decapitating a party.
I wonder how much research there has been on the GFC as a push/pull mechanism for European labour into the UK.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @SandyRentool feared they might do.
And then there is Liz Truss 😂
If you had 10 people earning $10, and then imported one person earning $1, then even if all the locals continued to earn exactly the same, then average wages would fall.
---
The chart does also raises an interesting question: why have German incomes continued to rise, even though - since 2016 - they have been the location to which EU immigrants from poorer nations flocked?
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
Of course, it is fascinating how little median disposable incomes in France, Germany, etc were affected by the GFC and Eurozone crises.
Who knows when it will be but @Scott_xP continual assertion that Sunak has to go for May or he will be removed is more his own hope than reality
I would add that when colleagues on here say it will be worse in the Autumn how much worse could it be in reality?
It is probably more because they want Starmer in no 10 asap which is fair enough
If Reform were on 12-13% they would have beaten the LDs comfortably in Rochdale.
I don't believe their true polling is more than about 7% currently but given that they never stand in local by elections we have little other evidence.
And if my hunch is correct, does it add about 5% to the Tories, or do they all stay at home?
Another reason why they just need to get on with it now.
In hindsight it looks like austerity was necessary/unavoidable for a period of a year or so following GFC. The problem was making austerity the policy rather than a painful step that was necessary to the minimum extent possible.
How’s your Monday?
At the end of the day, I like Michael Pettis’s theory - to which I believe you subscribe - that Britain has found itself to be a debtor nation and so, absent any contrary policy or exogenous shocks, it basically hollows out much of its productive export sector on an ongoing basis.
Germany is the opposite.
On dissent on the detail, you slightly misrepresent the three liberal justices' position, and certainly misrepresent Amy Coney Barrett, who gives the shortest and probably wisest opinion of the three - essentially that it's unnecessary to go beyond deciding it's obviously not possible and not intended for states to enforce this one as you can't be US President in Alabama but not Colorado.
I can see why the other five conservatives went beyond it to seek to avoid further controversy in December/January, and it's worth saying liberal justices aren't known for confining their judgments strictly to what is necessary - so there is a little whiff of hypocrisy in upbraiding the conservatives for being expansive. And I say that as someone who is onside with the liberals on most matters.
It's one thing let everything crumble a bit for a couple of years while the economy settles. (Whether that's wise economically, I don't know. I'm thinking from the perspective of the state of all the stuff.)
Continuing that for a decade and a bit, as we've now done, leads to the consequences we see around us.
Pint of coconut water in Jezza's case: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-alcohol-no-drink-unilad-coconut-water-apple-juice-labour-leader-a7775461.html
Perhaps it might have been best if Osborne had made more of a show of stealing Darling's policies - repeating over and over that "we're being responsible and sticking to Labour's austerity plans for the first 3 years - yes it's hard, but we'll see it through".
A consensus (even a feigned consensus) approach might well have meant that the implementation was more successful too. Osborne said all the right things in 2010-ish about cutting entire programmes - but it mostly ended up with the same old salami slicing mistakes being repeated, at least partly because of the difficulty of getting anything more dramatic through given the contested nature of the politics.
It's not a political combo I particularly relish - they'd probably try to out-green Labour, but it might carry the day with the PCP.
https://obr.uk/restated-march-2019-forecast/
When you suddenly borrow over £650bn in extra debt, your economy shrinks by over 10% in a year, and then you have a major war and a big post inflationary bubble on the rebound - it kind of screws things up.
It's not unfeasible that without those "events" the structural deficit would have been essentially eliminated this year.
An increase in lower-wage employment pulling the median down seems like a better explanation.
Osborne DID make all the right noises.
But in hindsight he failed quite badly to avoid salami slicing and badly hitting capex.
But this is an error. I think this must be a great niece
So we should see an improvement.
Have you ever been seen in the same room as Grant Shapps?
It is a scandal of wilfull Government and agency incompetence of epic proportions.
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
Things like that.
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your last paragraph is interesting.
I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment.
The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jul/19/new-band-wolfette
The parties that some people 'always' vote for because their great grandma did are all parties that are OK, even if they are a bit sub-optimal at times.
Politics as a direct action and engagement subject for nearly everyone is unattractive because it's boring and, crucially, takes up winter evenings in draughty church halls in the company of slightly deranged people. Even most PBers draw the line there.
Possibly something I bascially made up.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
But nobody seriously suggested following a different course at the time, and today the full employment consensus remains unbroken. What would the alternative be, and who would be most likely to propose it?
But the fact that you've come up with this as an option shows there are no obvious possibilities to replace Sunak. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think it's very unlikely (sub 10% chance).
Was it really all an unsustainable boom and not "real"?
It's as if from 2008 the government not only paid trillions to cover gambling losses, but put trillions more free money into the betting account so that they could carry on betting.
Lesson to self: read posts properly.
Was it something Labour did?
Or shall we apply Occam's razor and consider that maybe, just maybe, the Tories are crap at managing the economy?