"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
(Replying to the correct post). Properly scaled for the other ranks that would work. Probably best done after the abolition of the House of Lords though…
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Mentioning that exposes the true purpose - our regulatory bureaucracies have become captured by a multi-generational cabal of archaeologists, determined to create regular, easily identifiable, changes in the properties of litter, thus enabling convenient dating of different strata by future generations of archaeologists.
Hopefully that thought will provide some comfort for Casino.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
Yeah, same here.
Must be, I am in manufacturing. My employer puts in 9% if I put in 6%, if I put in 3% they put in 6%.
Previous place I was at used to offer this too but for new starters it is NEST
Private sector as a whole is far lower than public sector for Employer contribution.
There is a very good reason for this, if you're in a DC pension with a fund then the employer contribution goes into a pension fund for your pension. In the public sector "employer contribution" is not specific to that employee, it pays the current pension liability for the current pensioners. Also when public sector employees are asked to increase their personal contributions it's to pay for current pensioners not for their future pension.
"civil service pensions, like several other UK public sector pensions, are 'pay as you go' (or unfunded). There is no pension (investment) fund. Pensions are instead funded by contributions from current employers and employees, topped up as necessary by the Treasury"
The winners in this are the current public sector pensioners, who probably had to pay low pension contributions because the public sector was growing, more people funding fewer pensions, and life expectancy was lower. The losers are current public sector employees having to make higher pension contributions to pay for the current generation of long-lived pensioners.
At least if you're in the private sector with a DC pension your and your employers contributions are yours and you only have to worry about how the investments perform.
On topic (if you don't mind): I think optimism will increase in US politics, now that the Supreme Court has restored our civil rights laws. We are already seeing substantial changes in college admissions in the Ivy League, and changes in hiring at large firms.
(There are some creepy historical parallels in the ways many universities discriminated against Jews, to the way they have been, more recently, discriminating against Asians.)
The US fixation with its sacred “rights” will eventually rear it apart; for example it will continue to be a place where the legislature is bought by the highest bidder as long as it treats money as speech and then applies the 1st Amendment to it. The 2nd amendment is turning schools into combat zones, and the less said about the 3rd amendment the better,
Constitutionalism works until someone forgets that ".... constitutions are made for men, not men for constitutions"
When the later becomes the policy, the people rapidly overthrow the Constitution.
I recall some rather interesting, boozy evenings at Home House, trying to convince some lawyers of this.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Mentioning that exposes the true purpose - our regulatory bureaucracies have become captured by a multi-generational cabal of archaeologists, determined to create regular, easily identifiable, changes in the properties of litter, thus enabling convenient dating of different strata by future generations of archaeologists.
Hopefully that thought will provide some comfort for Casino.
Exactly what the Beaker People Defence League has been warning us about, but did we listen?
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
Indeed as people look short term.
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
Is the NHS pension funded, or is the employer contribution an accounting fiction related to a promise to pay a pension out of future tax revenues?
It's much cheaper to "pay" a pension contribution that doesn't actually need to be paid for a few decades, than a higher salary now.
Good question - don't know. ETA: unfunded from Google
The USS is funded and us whinging academics all got a nice (effective) pay rise a year or two back when the USS valuation improved (due to interest rates/gilt prices?) and the employee contribution dropped from near ~9% to ~6%. Prior to that, there was a chance of contributions moving the other way, quite substantially
iirc the USS pension was notorious for facing bankruptcy or being in wild excess depending on small variations in estimated growth, and your story confirms that.
...Then Labour are in for the shellacking of a lifetime come the next one.
If that's a continuation of the header title, which of the Con candidates is a good seller of optimism, do you think? (I agree that Starmer is not!)
In my political lifetime, the standouts are I guess Blair, Cameron (to a lesser extent) and Johnson. Obama across the pond. Of the Contenders(TM), I don't think Jenrick could pull it off (I'd suspect him of just trying to con me) and neither could TT. Badenoch maybe, although she does annoyance with the state of Britain better. Cleverly? Maybe.
British counter-terror police assist in investigating death of Telegraph journalist David Knowles
The 32-year-old creator of the Ukraine: The Latest podcast was on holiday in Gibraltar when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest
Counter-terror police from Scotland Yard are supporting officers in Gibraltar investigating the death of Telegraph journalist David Knowles.
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police travelled to Gibraltar following a request for assistance for their colleagues in the British Overseas Territory.
Mr Knowles, 32, who was one of the presenters on the award-winning Telegraph podcast, Ukraine: The Latest, was on holiday in Gibraltar at the weekend, when he died suddenly from a suspected cardiac arrest.
In a statement the Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP) stressed that despite the request for assistance from Scotland Yard, there were no specific concerns at this time surrounding the death.
Now that would be an interesting challenge for Starmer (if there is something untoward).
If Russia is still taking the piss after Salisbury, MH17 and doubtless other examples we don't know about, it would require a particularly salty response.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Mentioning that exposes the true purpose - our regulatory bureaucracies have become captured by a multi-generational cabal of archaeologists, determined to create regular, easily identifiable, changes in the properties of litter, thus enabling convenient dating of different strata by future generations of archaeologists.
Hopefully that thought will provide some comfort for Casino.
"And here you can see, from the absence of bottle caps, where the early anthropocene merges into the late, which preceded the extinction of humans, caused by their inability to drink from bottles with tethered caps"
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
Minor point about knives: In some US prisons, prisoners make their own "shanks", which can be quite deadly -- and are easy to conceal. They don't look scary to most people, though.
Funny you say that, I was watching Larry Lawton's youtube channel about exactly this.
They also make their own hooch in plastic bags !!!
Pruno. A Spanish winemaker also uses the name, whether out of some post modern vibe or a linguistic quirk I don't know.
'Full bodied from steroid abuse and working out in the yard'
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
In our sainted NHS, hallowed be its name, the employer contribution is 26.7%. Over a quarter of their salary.
No wonder the doctors retire or go part time in their forties and fifties. Madness if as described.
My wife has asked me to look at her pension as she is looking at retire and return next year and I have been looking through it. The 26.7% was in her documents. As was the actuarial value of her final salary 1995 pension
People forget when Health workers drone on about their wage that their overall package is not bad at all
They have yearly increments til they reach the top of the band, the high level of employer contribution and the extra holidays they get all have a value too.
Unfortunately the media, when covering the issue, fails to raise this side of it.
To be fair if you are a 30 year old doctor living in a flatshare with the opportunity to earn 2x in Canada or Australia it is not particularly relevant.
Indeed as people look short term.
So give them more salary in exchange for reduced pension benefits and reduced holiday benefits if it is not that relevant, eh ?
Is the NHS pension funded, or is the employer contribution an accounting fiction related to a promise to pay a pension out of future tax revenues?
It's much cheaper to "pay" a pension contribution that doesn't actually need to be paid for a few decades, than a higher salary now.
Good question - don't know. ETA: unfunded from Google
The USS is funded and us whinging academics all got a nice (effective) pay rise a year or two back when the USS valuation improved (due to interest rates/gilt prices?) and the employee contribution dropped from near ~9% to ~6%. Prior to that, there was a chance of contributions moving the other way, quite substantially
iirc the USS pension was notorious for facing bankruptcy or being in wild excess depending on small variations in estimated growth, and your story confirms that.
Just looked up the change, it was: "From 1 January 2024 you’ll pay a lower member contribution rate of 6.1% instead of 9.8% of salary. Your employer’s contribution rate will also reduce from 21.6% to 14.5%."
Benefits also improved, reversing some of the imminent-bankruptcy-induced nobbling of benefits a year or two earlier.
No doubt it will be bankrupt again in a year or two
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
£100bn for King Elon the first -Y/N?
£1trilion and then £100bn a year for that. Oh, and he has to spend his time opening new railway stations and public toilets…
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Hmm, most of that is standard right wing 'small state' fare with a dash of climate scepticism and some special pleading on behalf of Brexit. You can't expect a Labour government to be driven by those beliefs.
But your "finally" one has legs. Great legs, in fact. I'm dubious about governments creating growth. I think UK growth is determined mostly by factors outside the control of the UK government. To get good growth a government mainly needs to be lucky.
What I'd personally rather see Labour concentrate on is redistribution. The share of the pie not its size. That's where a government can have most impact. But I accept they weren't (and wouldn't have been) elected on that ticket.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Yes, and weren't there horrific stories of people, not wanting to be litter louts, putting the ring pull in the can before they'd finished the drink, taking a swig and then choking to death / getting their throats ripped to shreds. Nasty!
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Mentioning that exposes the true purpose - our regulatory bureaucracies have become captured by a multi-generational cabal of archaeologists, determined to create regular, easily identifiable, changes in the properties of litter, thus enabling convenient dating of different strata by future generations of archaeologists.
Hopefully that thought will provide some comfort for Casino.
Indeed; zonal marker fossils within the Anthropocene, like ammonites in the Jurassic.
Minor point about knives: In some US prisons, prisoners make their own "shanks", which can be quite deadly -- and are easy to conceal. They don't look scary to most people, though.
Funny you say that, I was watching Larry Lawton's youtube channel about exactly this.
They also make their own hooch in plastic bags !!!
Pruno. A Spanish winemaker also uses the name, whether out of some post modern vibe or a linguistic quirk I don't know.
'Full bodied from steroid abuse and working out in the yard'
Sounds utterly revolting, I will have to look this up on youtube when I get home.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Yes, and weren't there horrific stories of people, not wanting to be litter louts, putting the ring pull in the can before they'd finished the drink, taking a swig and then choking to death / getting their throats ripped to shreds. Nasty!
17% increase in staff and yet nhs productivity went backwards.
Wes giving it hard to the Tories.
But apparently the massive increase in public sector employment in the last 5 years is critical to the running of the country and if we were to get rid of them all everything would collapse.
And, what no-one ever talks about, is their mahoosive pension contributions at 20-30% plus per annum where, err, most private sector employers put in 3-6% max.
Maybe it's different in financial services where most employees can math, but my employer puts in 10% minimum.
Yeah, same here.
Must be, I am in manufacturing. My employer puts in 9% if I put in 6%, if I put in 3% they put in 6%.
Previous place I was at used to offer this too but for new starters it is NEST
Private sector as a whole is far lower than public sector for Employer contribution.
There is a very good reason for this, if you're in a DC pension with a fund then the employer contribution goes into a pension fund for your pension. In the public sector "employer contribution" is not specific to that employee, it pays the current pension liability for the current pensioners. Also when public sector employees are asked to increase their personal contributions it's to pay for current pensioners not for their future pension.
"civil service pensions, like several other UK public sector pensions, are 'pay as you go' (or unfunded). There is no pension (investment) fund. Pensions are instead funded by contributions from current employers and employees, topped up as necessary by the Treasury"
The winners in this are the current public sector pensioners, who probably had to pay low pension contributions because the public sector was growing, more people funding fewer pensions, and life expectancy was lower. The losers are current public sector employees having to make higher pension contributions to pay for the current generation of long-lived pensioners.
At least if you're in the private sector with a DC pension your and your employers contributions are yours and you only have to worry about how the investments perform.
So, the Treasury can decide that we will top up their pensions, whilst making it less affordable for us to top our own pensions, because they’ve increased our tax to pay for their pensions.
Looks like a 15 or 10mph trial will be coming to Edinburgh's George Street.
"Small earthquake detected in Eyri National Park - British Geological Survey"
Is that instead of putting proper cycle lanes in?
10mph will catch most cyclists and some of the faster runners: a four minute mile is 15mph.
In my experience most of the people in George Street barely average 0.15mph, less in the festival as they look around gormlessly wondering who thought a turd was a good addition to the new hotel.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax.
Exactly right and this is why those advocating a wealth tax should pause and reflect instead of thinking they can just harvest whatever they want.
I remember Dan Neidle posting on twitter something which made me think.
He basically said look at introducing a beard tax. 5 Million men in the UK have beards. We will make people pay a tax of £1,000 a year to have a beard. Therefore we will get £5 Billion a year in taxes.
In reality what will happen. People will shave. It will be avoided.
There would be a small number that would grow a beard to show they could afford the tax.
Better would be to start selling baronetcies again: should raise a few million with no cost to the state.
Think big. How many billionaires would part with an actual billion to be an actual Duke? (citizenship included)
£100bn for King Elon the first -Y/N?
£1trilion and then £100bn a year for that. Oh, and he has to spend his time opening new railway stations and public toilets…
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Yes, and weren't there horrific stories of people, not wanting to be litter louts, putting the ring pull in the can before they'd finished the drink, taking a swig and then choking to death / getting their throats ripped to shreds. Nasty!
Were there?
Oh yes: for instance this on a very quick dig (which also reminds us that they didn't show up on X-rays, given the low atomic mass of aluminium):
Looks like a 15 or 10mph trial will be coming to Edinburgh's George Street.
"Small earthquake detected in Eyri National Park - British Geological Survey"
Is that instead of putting proper cycle lanes in?
10mph will catch most cyclists and some of the faster runners: a four minute mile is 15mph.
In my experience most of the people in George Street barely average 0.15mph, less in the festival as they look around gormlessly wondering who thought a turd was a good addition to the new hotel.
National Cycle Route 1 - the long-distance route from Dover to John O'Groats - runs along George Street.
From my memory, drivers were more dangerous on The Mound than on George Street.
Looks like a 15 or 10mph trial will be coming to Edinburgh's George Street.
"Small earthquake detected in Eyri National Park - British Geological Survey"
Is that instead of putting proper cycle lanes in?
I worked in George Street from 1962 - 1964 and it was busy then
In terms of pedestrians for the shops there it always seemed dead (festival excepted). You'd need to ban traffic altogether to get people back I'd have thought.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
...Then Labour are in for the shellacking of a lifetime come the next one.
More mature PB’ers will remember how deeply unpopular Mrs T was during her terms, then each time the election came around the opposition was unable to put forward a credible alternative and she would win again.
Anyone making statements such as the above at such an early stage - and with the Tories still in perpetual disarray - is being foolish.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
Smaller families are largely correlated with female emancipation and education
Which d1ckhead in the EU came up with this bottlecap bullshit?
Can't buy or drink anything now without it scratching my mouth and nose.
And we should drop it rather than copy it.
This illustrates perfectly an issue with Brexit and regulation and us thinking leaving the EU meant we could have less regulation.
Why would a global manufacturer of drinks buy two different sets of caps, one for the UK one for the EU, when they could have just one common one and manage far fewer SKU's
Which is why we need to have a seat at the table where these rules are written.
Annoying things the EU does is one of the best reasons for joining it.
Of course, now we're out of the EU we're free to tackle these issues.
If the current government fails to pass a Bottle Tops (Mandatory Separation Of) bill then we can simply vote in another one at the next election that commits to this in its manifesto and so be free of the tyranny of EU regulation* in practice as well as in theory, if not of an increasing tangle of red tape our own regulations.
*is it? What's the thinking - I think I saw something about making recycling easier on some packaging, is it because the caps are small enough by themselves to be harder for the sorting machines/people to handle and pick out?
Also generally reduction of litter. Some of us remember (you may not!) the old ringpull openings on drinks cans which came completely off the tin as designed, and were a plague on wildlife and coin op machines, and those PBers who couldn't give a damn would be horrified at their effect on motor vehicle tyres.
Yes, and weren't there horrific stories of people, not wanting to be litter louts, putting the ring pull in the can before they'd finished the drink, taking a swig and then choking to death / getting their throats ripped to shreds. Nasty!
Were there?
i don't remember that being reported, though we didn't have the internet or hysterical sky news reporters then.
...Then Labour are in for the shellacking of a lifetime come the next one.
More mature PB’ers will remember how deeply unpopular Mrs T was during her terms, then each time the election came around the opposition was unable to put forward a credible alternative and she would win again.
Anyone making statements such as the above at such an early stage - and with the Tories still in perpetual disarray - is being foolish.
A process which perpetuated the intense hated continuity Labour had for the SDP.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
The state does many of the basics which provide the foundation for growth. Eg the legal system. Health and education. Hard and soft infrastructure essentially. The trampoline on which we all bounce about. Then within that consensus (regulated market economy, public services, law and order, defence of the realm) what the government further does or doesn't do is only of marginal impact (on growth). Other (mainly global) factors dominate.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
No doubt there have been formal investigations of this question, but I haven't seen any accounts of them. What are the effects of taxes on Veblen goods, for example, the latest iPhone?
If the price goes up, does that make it more valuable to the buyer? If the price stays constant, is the government confiscating monopoly profits, at no loss to the buyer?
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Kini is rich and (in this instance) has children above school age. So he can opine at leisure about his preferred model of society knowing that any rough edges will not affect him.
The very definition of champagne socialist.
Also he is a wealth redistributor while not quite wanting to redistribute his own wealth as he is waiting for the government to say everyone should do so.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Yes. In particular yes to the first sentence of your third para. I would also add an 'and individuals' after businesses.
Tuesday's epic Harris v Trump debate, has underlined the burning question facing American voters in 2024 -
- Which candidate for POTUS is MOST likely to bite the head off of a cat . . . AND swallow it?
Now that RFK Jr. has "retired" from the race (in selected battleground states anyway) looks to this PBer like DJT-JDV ticket isthe (real) clear choice!
Tuesday's epic Harris v Trump debate, has underlined the burning question facing American voters in 2024 -
- Which candidate for POTUS is MOST likely to bite the head off of a cat . . . AND swallow it?
Now that RFK Jr. has "retired" from the race (in selected battleground states anyway) looks to this PBer like DJT-JDV ticket isthe (real) clear choice!
About them cats...
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, a Trump supporter, says Trump is wrong about the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and the officials in Springfield have no evidence of migrants eating pets there. It all started with a rumor on Facebook. https://x.com/acnewsitics/status/1833999232291790862
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
The state does many of the basics which provide the foundation for growth. Eg the legal system. Health and education. Hard and soft infrastructure essentially. The trampoline on which we all bounce about. Then within that consensus (regulated market economy, public services, law and order, defence of the realm) what the government further does or doesn't do is only of marginal impact (on growth). Other (mainly global) factors dominate.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
I think there's a lot of hard and soft infrastructure that's in poor shape in Britain, and a lot could be done to improve the rate of growth by improving it.
As someone entirely unsurprised about this turn of events, it's worth noting that there will also be occasions in the next decade in which, despite Brexit, Western European growth will pull ahead of UK growth.
But I also expect in the long term the UK to do less badly than the rest of Western Europe. Central Europe will continue to catch up to the European mean because there is still post -cold-war ground to be made up, so tge EU figure as a whole willlook less bad.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Just make sure the best schools are in the poorest areas with the poorest pupils.
Tuesday's epic Harris v Trump debate, has underlined the burning question facing American voters in 2024 -
- Which candidate for POTUS is MOST likely to bite the head off of a cat . . . AND swallow it?
Now that RFK Jr. has "retired" from the race (in selected battleground states anyway) looks to this PBer like DJT-JDV ticket isthe (real) clear choice!
About them cats...
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, a Trump supporter, says Trump is wrong about the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and the officials in Springfield have no evidence of migrants eating pets there. It all started with a rumor on Facebook. https://x.com/acnewsitics/status/1833999232291790862
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack..
As someone entirely unsurprised about this turn of events, it's worth noting that there will also be occasions in the next decade in which, despite Brexit, Western European growth will pull ahead of UK growth.
But I also expect in the long term the UK to do less badly than the rest of Western Europe. Central Europe will continue to catch up to the European mean because there is still post -cold-war ground to be made up, so tge EU figure as a whole willlook less bad.
There was a lot of crowing about projections showing Poland becoming richer than the UK, but people tended to overlook the fact that the same data showed them overtaking France and Germany.
Tuesday's epic Harris v Trump debate, has underlined the burning question facing American voters in 2024 -
- Which candidate for POTUS is MOST likely to bite the head off of a cat . . . AND swallow it?
Now that RFK Jr. has "retired" from the race (in selected battleground states anyway) looks to this PBer like DJT-JDV ticket isthe (real) clear choice!
About them cats...
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, a Trump supporter, says Trump is wrong about the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and the officials in Springfield have no evidence of migrants eating pets there. It all started with a rumor on Facebook. https://x.com/acnewsitics/status/1833999232291790862
Yes, having a leader of the free world who says and does things on the back of some random post on Facebook or Twitter isn’t concerning at all, no sirree….
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
If you have an attitude of No Factories, No infrastructure, No, No, No. Then you have no growth.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
The state does many of the basics which provide the foundation for growth. Eg the legal system. Health and education. Hard and soft infrastructure essentially. The trampoline on which we all bounce about. Then within that consensus (regulated market economy, public services, law and order, defence of the realm) what the government further does or doesn't do is only of marginal impact (on growth). Other (mainly global) factors dominate.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
I think there's a lot of hard and soft infrastructure that's in poor shape in Britain, and a lot could be done to improve the rate of growth by improving it.
Under both Trump and Biden, the US has certainly put a lot of $$$ into roads and bridges and the like
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Just make sure the best schools are in the poorest areas with the poorest pupils.
How? If you do manage to create a very good school in a "poor" area (not easy without spending a lot of money on staffing) then the house prices in the catchment areas will rise, pricing out the poorer families.
Unless you make sure that places are allocated by something other than distance to the school of course. Possibly some sort of test done by the pupils when they are about 11...
Actually schools in poorer areas get significantly more funding due to the Pupil Premium.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Just make sure the best schools are in the poorest areas with the poorest pupils.
Which will soon become the richer area's as the property gets bought up
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
The state does many of the basics which provide the foundation for growth. Eg the legal system. Health and education. Hard and soft infrastructure essentially. The trampoline on which we all bounce about. Then within that consensus (regulated market economy, public services, law and order, defence of the realm) what the government further does or doesn't do is only of marginal impact (on growth). Other (mainly global) factors dominate.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
I think there's a lot of hard and soft infrastructure that's in poor shape in Britain, and a lot could be done to improve the rate of growth by improving it.
I agree and I hope we shape up on that front. However I'd still expect other factors to dwarf the impact of that on growth.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Just make sure the best schools are in the poorest areas with the poorest pupils.
How? If you do manage to create a very good school in a "poor" area (not easy without spending a lot of money on staffing) then the house prices in the catchment areas will rise, pricing out the poorer families.
Unless you make sure that places are allocated by something other than distance to the school of course. Possibly some sort of test done by the pupils when they are about 11...
Actually schools in poorer areas get significantly more funding due to the Pupil Premium.
In some areas it wouldn't matter if you brought in the world's best teachers. The results would still be mediocre.
My mother used to teach in a primary school in a sink estate. The tales she could tell...
...like the school playground fight that had to be broken up, and when an enquiry was made as to what it was about, the answer was - "his Dad shot my Dad"
...Then Labour are in for the shellacking of a lifetime come the next one.
More mature PB’ers will remember how deeply unpopular Mrs T was during her terms, then each time the election came around the opposition was unable to put forward a credible alternative and she would win again.
Anyone making statements such as the above at such an early stage - and with the Tories still in perpetual disarray - is being foolish.
A process which perpetuated the intense hated continuity Labour had for the SDP.
Yet polls show Labour would have lost by more, facing the Tories alone
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Ooo no, bum rap. Don't see how you're picking up 'complacency' from anything I said. I'm just realistic about the balance between factors in and out of the government's control when it comes to our GDP growth.
Looks like a 15 or 10mph trial will be coming to Edinburgh's George Street.
"Small earthquake detected in Eyri National Park - British Geological Survey"
Is that instead of putting proper cycle lanes in?
10mph will catch most cyclists and some of the faster runners: a four minute mile is 15mph.
In my experience most of the people in George Street barely average 0.15mph, less in the festival as they look around gormlessly wondering who thought a turd was a good addition to the new hotel.
Next time I go to Edinburgh I’m definitely staying in that hotel. It’s the only place in the city without the sh!tty view of it blotting the landscape.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
Well yes - it's something of a mystery. It's a pretty remarkable turnaround from 'vote for us - we'll try really hard to grow the economy' to 'let's ramp up taxes, discourage investment and scare all the capital away' in 2 months or so.
Granted we haven't had the budget yet and it might turn out to be totally different from the mood music.
It could be that the policies we see over the next few years are not "anti-growth", they are just not the sort of economics favoured by the right. That's where my money would be. This is a Labour government after all. We had the Cons for 14 years and now we have Labour.
Course we don't know how we'll do on growth in this parliament yet. If it turns out it's poor Labour will have a hell of a job getting re-elected. They know this better than anyone. Which is why, succeed or fail, we can be pretty sure their policies will on the whole be intended to boost growth not depress it.
Your last paragraph, could, logically be applied to government by any party. I look forward to this discussion again in five or ten or fifteen years time when government of another party is in and you can also assure us that their policies will necessarily be pro-growth
Of my many reservations about Labour, my biggest is that they seem unable to see that economic policies have consequences: if you increase a tax on x, the behaviour of people who do x changes, and less of x gets done. You don't just rake in the tax. So: people move from the private sector to the state sector in education; or billionaires move elsewhere in the world, or businesses stop hiring, or people stop investing in pensions. I had hoped that Rachel Reeves would not be like this, but early signs are not promising.
At the same time, are we actually investing the sorts of things that create growth, like infrastructure and education? Again, maybe we will. But early signs are not promising.
Well the intention of big economic policy (both parties) usually is pro growth. The one serious exception to this that comes to mind in recent years is Brexit. That was a policy to damage growth. A rare bird.
Re Reeves, she's bound to upset some people with her choices (eg WFA) given the parlous state of the public finances. I promise you I'll have a moan myself if she does something I think is either wrongheaded or gratuitously nasty.
Well not that rare! Lockdown, for example, was the most economically catastrophic policy of my lifetime by a country mile. Done for arguably valid reasons (I would argue erroneously, but I'm in a minority), but economically negative nonetheless. And there are countless others. The triple lock. Net zero. DEI legilsation. And so on. There are dozens of areas in which policy is made where the negative impact on growth is deemed a price worth paying for whatever the reason for the policy is.
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart. But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
Ok - but I was talking about the thrust of macro-economic policy. That tends to be aimed at promoting growth. It's just that people differ on what best does this. I'd allude to skinning and cats if I didn't have a cat.
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
That's a reasonable position to take. I'd argue that there's lots that governments can do, both positive and negative, to 'go for growth' - a local example being the RoI, which has gone for growth in a big way over the last 40 years (#1 by low business rates). But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
The low business taxes are symbolic, but there's so much more to it than that.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Its like his view that private schools should be abolished. People point out it will have knock on consequences such as the catchement area's of good schools being made untenable for the poorer in society as they are snapped up by the richer people. He just airily declares it won't happen
Just make sure the best schools are in the poorest areas with the poorest pupils.
How? If you do manage to create a very good school in a "poor" area (not easy without spending a lot of money on staffing) then the house prices in the catchment areas will rise, pricing out the poorer families.
Unless you make sure that places are allocated by something other than distance to the school of course. Possibly some sort of test done by the pupils when they are about 11...
Actually schools in poorer areas get significantly more funding due to the Pupil Premium.
Ask Katherine Birbalsingh, who’s managed to create an outstanding school in one of the most deprived areas of the country.
It is deeply disappointing that Petroineos have confirmed their previous decision to close Grangemouth oil refinery.
What an utter twat that man is. He wasn't 'unfairly photographed with a bacon sandwich', it was just a moment of distilled twat, just as this is, and the Edstone was.
"On her record so far, Reeves is quickly turning out to be the worst Chancellor of modern times – and it won’t be long before there is talk about replacing her."
Says the Telegraph. Let's wait until she does cockups which inevitably will happen. You have a budget in a month. Honestly the impatience of people to show Labour are failing is laughable. There are 4 to 5 years to go. Can we not wait a few more months until something really happens.
I voted Labour and have a bit of Buyers remorse at the moment but it is far too early to castigate Rachel Reeves.
I agree with the WFA cut, I do not see that she has done anything wrong so far apart from, possibly, the way it was handled.
TBH I get why the Tories and their supporters cannot wait to try to show labour is failing us. If would be no different if the boot was on the other foot.
The Tory press is doing exactly what you’d expect it to do, and it’s perfectly within its rights to do so. Of course the Telegraph is going to say things like Reeves is the worse chancellor in history. It may well be working: Labour have lost the spin battles since July.
Equally it makes sense for supporters of Labour to position this as desperate bleating by a right wing press in denial. Which might also work a bit.
I don't have a great sense of spin battles being either lost or won atm.
Labour will dip a fair bit in the polls and Tories will claim success. Tories have forgotten how to govern. Year 1, clear the decks, announce anything bad. Year 4 spread the jam.
That of course supposes that there is any jam in Year 4, which given Labour's extraordinary anti-growth policies on tax, Net Zero, regulation, well everything except a bit on housing, is very unlikely. And that's assuming there aren't any large external shocks.
Also it's by no means even certain, as the Conservatives found out in 1997, that the electorate will thank you for good economic news. If the narrative has set in that you're crap, it's incredibly difficult to shift.
Why do you think they've made growth politically totemic if their policies are anti growth?
That's a very interesting question.
I'd say probably a combination of reasons.
Firstly they believe the fantasy of "green growth", "green jobs", etc., peddled by Miliband and others - the idea that jobs lost by massively increasing regulatory burdens will somehow be outweighed by jobs created in elsewhere in the economy to implement growth. Whereas, of course, the opposite has been and will continue to be the case - our industry is shafted with the highest energy costs in the world, while most of the "green" manufacturing jobs, such as they are, have gone overseas.
Secondly, neither Starmer nor his Chancellor have ever earned a penny from business or been involved in supply side economic policy. Reeves' only experience was as a tea girl in the Bank of England, which deals with demand side policy, not supply side, whereas the obstacles to growth in this country are all on the supply side. This lack of experience means they simply don't understand the importance, and fragility, of business confidence and light regulation in economic growth.
Thirdly, Starmer in particular is a technocrat, and like all technocrats of both parties - Heseltine, Gordon Brown, Ted Heath, etc. - completely overestimates the ability of the government to promote economic growth by meddling with the market. They think that government can create good and viable businesses (rather than union-dominated obsolete wrecks) and that a subsidy here or there will make business more effective, rather than just encouraging business to seek more subsidies as that's much easier than increasing sales and cutting costs.
Fourthly, related, Starmer is a lawyer, and like all lawyers has a tendency to assume that if the government issues a law, it will happen, and the law, being issued by him, must be good and so will never have negative side-effects. Whereas, in fact, all laws have negative side-effects, which very often outweigh whatever good comes of them (see lockdowns as the most egregious recent example).
Fifthly, he may have believed his own propaganda that leaving the Single Market had a massive negative effect on the UK economy, and that if he turned up smiling in Brussels they would fall over themselves to give him an amazing deal which would get things back to the Nirvana of 2015.
Finally, of course, there is the electoral reason. The electorate realises, however dimly, that the economy hasn't done well over the last decade and a half and he needs to pretend he has some answers.
Seventh, growth is the natural state of the economy.
Yep. And I'd edit to say 'low' growth is the natural state of the economy.
I'd argue that growth is the natural state of the economy, and the state intervenes to stop this happening. Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
The state does many of the basics which provide the foundation for growth. Eg the legal system. Health and education. Hard and soft infrastructure essentially. The trampoline on which we all bounce about. Then within that consensus (regulated market economy, public services, law and order, defence of the realm) what the government further does or doesn't do is only of marginal impact (on growth). Other (mainly global) factors dominate.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
To be fair to him, Boris Johnson tried to do his bit for demographics!
Comments
Hopefully that thought will provide some comfort for Casino.
"civil service pensions, like several other UK public sector pensions, are 'pay as you go' (or unfunded). There is no pension (investment) fund. Pensions are instead funded by contributions from current employers and employees, topped up as necessary by the Treasury"
The winners in this are the current public sector pensioners, who probably had to pay low pension contributions because the public sector was growing, more people funding fewer pensions, and life expectancy was lower. The losers are current public sector employees having to make higher pension contributions to pay for the current generation of long-lived pensioners.
At least if you're in the private sector with a DC pension your and your employers contributions are yours and you only have to worry about how the investments perform.
When the later becomes the policy, the people rapidly overthrow the Constitution.
I recall some rather interesting, boozy evenings at Home House, trying to convince some lawyers of this.
In my political lifetime, the standouts are I guess Blair, Cameron (to a lesser extent) and Johnson. Obama across the pond. Of the Contenders(TM), I don't think Jenrick could pull it off (I'd suspect him of just trying to con me) and neither could TT. Badenoch maybe, although she does annoyance with the state of Britain better. Cleverly? Maybe.
If Russia is still taking the piss after Salisbury, MH17 and doubtless other examples we don't know about, it would require a particularly salty response.
A Spanish winemaker also uses the name, whether out of some post modern vibe or a linguistic quirk I don't know.
'Full bodied from steroid abuse and working out in the yard'
Benefits also improved, reversing some of the imminent-bankruptcy-induced nobbling of benefits a year or two earlier.
No doubt it will be bankrupt again in a year or two
"Small earthquake detected in Eyri National Park - British Geological Survey"
But your "finally" one has legs. Great legs, in fact. I'm dubious about governments creating growth. I think UK growth is determined mostly by factors outside the control of the UK government. To get good growth a government mainly needs to be lucky.
What I'd personally rather see Labour concentrate on is redistribution. The share of the pie not its size. That's where a government can have most impact. But I accept they weren't (and wouldn't have been) elected on that ticket.
It will be men with red flags in front of cars next.
https://earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/earthquakes/recent_uk_events.html
https://earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/earthquakes/recent_events/20240907053150.html#page=summary
'Felt by a single person in Llandygai, who reported "I was already awake and heard a faint noise and weak rumble".'
I am registered if ever visiting London but that will not happen anytime soon
Some of us, of course, deem Brexit more likely to be an economic plus! But I know you're not in that camp, and more importantly for the purpose of this argument nor was treasury.
You can prioritise growth, or you can prioritise other things, and there will be valid reasons for either. You either prioritise the nation getting richer at the expense of nice things today like clean streets and working public toilets, or you prioritise nice things today at the expense of the speed of getting rich. Where we sit on the continuum of how much growth we sacrifice in order to pay for the nice things today probably isn't that far apart.
But even though my expectations of Rachel Reeves were modest in this regard, I've been slightly disappointed at the extent to which she has prioritised things which are not growing the economy.
I have no complaints at all about the WFA. That was an anti growth gimmick introduced by Gordon Brown and its abolition is a step in the right direction. (Personally, I would have rolled it into the overall state pension but then changed the pension to a single lock rather than a triple lock - i.e. it grows with median wages.) But meanwhile there have been too many steps in the wrong direction which will make us poorer.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15393799_Aluminium_ring_pulls_An_invisible_foreign_body
From my memory, drivers were more dangerous on The Mound than on George Street.
Often justifiably, because a lot of the things that the state does to hinder growth are things which we want like clean rivers or less carbon in the atmosphere. Yay the state, up to a point. But we can't pretend that this doesn't have an impact on growth.
I'd also argue, slightly separately, that growth, or otherwise, is massively driven by demographics to an extent which we discuss puzzlingly seldom. Indeed, pretty much everything is driven by demographics. (Including, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion, demographics itself. Why are so many countries with wildly different internal characteristics falling so far short of replacement levels? I would argue that the one thing they have in common is a lot of old people. The more top-heavy the pyramid, the more resources the society has to put into looking after its elderly, so the less it can put into raising the next generation. A topic for a research paper of some sort...)
https://x.com/ed_miliband/status/1834175566280278148
It is deeply disappointing that Petroineos have confirmed their previous decision to close Grangemouth oil refinery.
BBC News - National debt set to treble over next 50 years, says OBR - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewlwkg82ggo
Net Zero
I'm a 'going for growth' sceptic. I think how we do on growth depends mainly on things which are nothing to do with government. I'd rather government concentrate on redistribution/equality, public services and social engineering.
Anyone making statements such as the above at such an early stage - and with the Tories still in perpetual disarray - is being foolish.
But there are 99 reasons why the UK <> RoI, and economics is complex, and CoE isn't my job. So my opinion on this is just that: an opinion.
Just John Craven's Newsround.
Mostly it's an attitude difference. Ireland knows that businesses don't have to base themselves in Ireland, but that Ireland will be dirt poor if it can't persuade them to do so.
People in Britain don't seem to realise that businesses have choices and choices have consequences. It's not an inevitable feature of reality that Britain will continue to be a wealthy advanced economy. Arguably it has already declined some way towards the middle of the pack.
Attitudes like kinabalu's are incredibly complacent.
Agree with your 2nd para. I guess the reason demographics isn't mentioned much is it's a given. One of those 'other factors'. Things driving/dampening growth which the government can't do much about.
If the price goes up, does that make it more valuable to the buyer? If the price stays constant, is the government confiscating monopoly profits, at no loss to the buyer?
Some mix of the two, depending?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
The very definition of champagne socialist.
Also he is a wealth redistributor while not quite wanting to redistribute his own wealth as he is waiting for the government to say everyone should do so.
https://news.sky.com/story/crime-minister-has-purse-stolen-at-police-conference-13213512
https://news.sky.com/story/second-interest-rate-cut-by-european-central-bank-as-growth-falters-13213517
Ah but it is the result of 14 years of conservative mismanagement !!!!
I would also add an 'and individuals' after businesses.
- Which candidate for POTUS is MOST likely to bite the head off of a cat . . . AND swallow it?
Now that RFK Jr. has "retired" from the race (in selected battleground states anyway) looks to this PBer like DJT-JDV ticket isthe (real) clear choice!
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, a Trump supporter, says Trump is wrong about the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and the officials in Springfield have no evidence of migrants eating pets there. It all started with a rumor on Facebook.
https://x.com/acnewsitics/status/1833999232291790862
But I also expect in the long term the UK to do less badly than the rest of Western Europe.
Central Europe will continue to catch up to the European mean because there is still post -cold-war ground to be made up, so tge EU figure as a whole willlook less bad.
Tech revenue per employee:
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https://x.com/TrungTPhan/status/1833881502041641099
It's about choices.
How does that make you feel?
NEW THREAD
Just thought I would join in with daft wishful predictions for an election at least 4 years away..
Unless you make sure that places are allocated by something other than distance to the school of course. Possibly some sort of test done by the pupils when they are about 11...
Actually schools in poorer areas get significantly more funding due to the Pupil Premium.
My mother used to teach in a primary school in a sink estate. The tales she could tell...
...like the school playground fight that had to be broken up, and when an enquiry was made as to what it was about, the answer was - "his Dad shot my Dad"
[Use a Scouse accent for this if you like]
MICHIGAN GE: @InsiderPolling
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🟦 Harris: 48%
🟪 Other: 1%
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