On the back of yesterday's local council by-elections, a reminder that of Reform's 50 target seats, 27 are currently held by Labour and 23 by the Conservatives.
Angela Rayner has called in an application for 8,400 homes just *three hours* before it was due to go to planning committee with a recommendation for refusal.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
Why would you assume that wouldn't be popular?
Let's see, shall we ?
Much depends on what Trump actually does, as I must have repeated at least a dozen times now. But if he's really going to go ahead and try for 10m plus deportations, as his comments at least imply, then I predict now that the results won't be popular.
Except with a small subset of GOP voters.
Tariffs and immigration are the big question marks. I suspect he will do a lot less on both than he has promised, but just enough to keep them regularly in the headlines.
What Trump wants, of course, is for the Democrats to stop him from implementing his policies. Then he has an enemy. Someone who is standing in the way of him carrying out his promises.
The Democrats should welcome the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the introduction of tariffs. I mean they'll be shitty for the American people and all, but at least it would mean people would be able to see the impact of those moves.
Yes, which is ironically why the Democrats do NOT want to scrape a win in the House having already lost the Presidency and Senate.
Full GOP control of the White House and Congress to implement Trumpism in tooth and claw is their best hope of a swingback in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
All those Alibaba goods on Amazon are suddenly going to be produced in the States. Really?
Not only that, but one of the consequences of a 10% across the board tariff would be a rise in the US exchange rate, which would have the effect of making foreign goods the same price as previously, but making US exports less competitive.
Ultimately, if you want to bring your economy into balance, you need to raise the domestic savings rate. That - I'm afraid - would not be pretty.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
given the current consensus is that low skill immigration is a drain on the economy each return probably makes money in the long term. Can you face up to that ?
Surely, like anything else, the answer is "it depends".
I mean, would you really argue the low skilled immigration to Dubai and the UAE, or to Singapore, been a drain on their economies?
So I suspect it depends on the part of the country and on the industry. It is also worth remembering that the parts of the US that have seen the most stagnant economies, are the ones with the least low skilled immigration. (Albeit, I suspect that the causation is the other way around.)
Most of Dubai and the UAE is desert and they have largely immigrant populations with lots of oil wealth for the native population too.
Singapore is an ultra low tax city state with the most educated population in the world
Dubai doesn't have any oil.
And Singapore chooses to educate their citizens, and then import low skilled workers.
Personally, I think the Singapore model is smarter than not educating your citizens well. I mean, I don't dream of my kids working as cleaners.
Oriental East Asians also have the highest average IQs in the world, it is partly inherited intelligence as much as a good education system that puts Singapore top
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
given the current consensus is that low skill immigration is a drain on the economy each return probably makes money in the long term. Can you face up to that ?
Surely, like anything else, the answer is "it depends".
I mean, would you really argue the low skilled immigration to Dubai and the UAE, or to Singapore, been a drain on their economies?
So I suspect it depends on the part of the country and on the industry. It is also worth remembering that the parts of the US that have seen the most stagnant economies, are the ones with the least low skilled immigration. (Albeit, I suspect that the causation is the other way around.)
Most of Dubai and the UAE is desert and they have largely immigrant populations with lots of oil wealth for the native population too.
Singapore is an ultra low tax city state with the most educated population in the world
Dubai doesn't have any oil.
And Singapore chooses to educate their citizens, and then import low skilled workers.
Personally, I think the Singapore model is smarter than not educating your citizens well. I mean, I don't dream of my kids working as cleaners.
Oriental East Asians also have the highest average IQs in the world, it is partly inherited intelligence as much as a good education system that puts Singapore top
Dubai's oil production is about 50,000 barrels per day, which - while not nothing - doesn't make a significant contribution to the economy. It's why they went down the business and tourism route: they simply didn't have the energy resources to make it pay.
Next door Abu Dhabi, by contrast, produces close to 5 million barrels per day. That's a 100-fold difference.
Angela Rayner has called in an application for 8,400 homes just *three hours* before it was due to go to planning committee with a recommendation for refusal.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
Why would you assume that wouldn't be popular?
Well, there's a too high price for everything. I mean if you could deport 10 million illegal immigrants for $1bn, but then next 1 million would cost $100bn, then there's a certain diminishing return kicking in.
Certainly is, such as spending £100 million on a bat tunnel for HS2.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
Angela Rayner has called in an application for 8,400 homes just *three hours* before it was due to go to planning committee with a recommendation for refusal.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
given the current consensus is that low skill immigration is a drain on the economy each return probably makes money in the long term. Can you face up to that ?
Surely, like anything else, the answer is "it depends".
I mean, would you really argue the low skilled immigration to Dubai and the UAE, or to Singapore, been a drain on their economies?
So I suspect it depends on the part of the country and on the industry. It is also worth remembering that the parts of the US that have seen the most stagnant economies, are the ones with the least low skilled immigration. (Albeit, I suspect that the causation is the other way around.)
Most of Dubai and the UAE is desert and they have largely immigrant populations with lots of oil wealth for the native population too.
Singapore is an ultra low tax city state with the most educated population in the world
Dubai doesn't have any oil.
And Singapore chooses to educate their citizens, and then import low skilled workers.
Personally, I think the Singapore model is smarter than not educating your citizens well. I mean, I don't dream of my kids working as cleaners.
Oriental East Asians also have the highest average IQs in the world, it is partly inherited intelligence as much as a good education system that puts Singapore top
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
Why would you assume that wouldn't be popular?
Let's see, shall we ?
Much depends on what Trump actually does, as I must have repeated at least a dozen times now. But if he's really going to go ahead and try for 10m plus deportations, as his comments at least imply, then I predict now that the results won't be popular.
Except with a small subset of GOP voters.
Tariffs and immigration are the big question marks. I suspect he will do a lot less on both than he has promised, but just enough to keep them regularly in the headlines.
What Trump wants, of course, is for the Democrats to stop him from implementing his policies. Then he has an enemy. Someone who is standing in the way of him carrying out his promises.
The Democrats should welcome the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the introduction of tariffs. I mean they'll be shitty for the American people and all, but at least it would mean people would be able to see the impact of those moves.
Yes, which is ironically why the Democrats do NOT want to scrape a win in the House having already lost the Presidency and Senate.
Full GOP control of the White House and Congress to implement Trumpism in tooth and claw is their best hope of a swingback in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race
The Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and Congress from 2000 to 2006 - they lost both the Senate and House in the 2006 midterms and of course the Presidency in 2008. The House was regained by the Republicans in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016.
It's perfectly possible the Democrats will regain Congress in 2026 - the Senate seats to be contested are 20 Republican and 13 Democrat but if the background mood is right the Democrats could take enough Republican seats to wipe out the 54-44 (or 53-45) lead.
Clinton of course spectacularly lost Congress to Newt Gingrich and the Senate to Bob Dole in 1994 but went on to beat Dole comfortably in the 1996 Presidential election.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
We didna ken! Well, ye ken the noo!
See also: tarrifs. And most of the other stuff he has said he will do.
The Trump genius was to persuade loads of people that he would do the thing they wanted, but the stuff they didn't want was just a blag. The Trump supergenius was to persuade different people about this for different things.
To be clear- not because voters are stupid, but because Trump is a supergenius at this sort of thing.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
I don’t know how closely we align politically but I always find your posts interesting and I find very little to disagree with.
I think if Labour wants to win again, it’s going to have make progress on immigration and the economy. But that means changes that working people can actually feel. That’s the crucial thing.
I am not sure how relevant the culture war really is, I am not sure people are really voting on that basis and to be honest SKS doesn’t strike me as very interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
Why would you assume that wouldn't be popular?
Let's see, shall we ?
Much depends on what Trump actually does, as I must have repeated at least a dozen times now. But if he's really going to go ahead and try for 10m plus deportations, as his comments at least imply, then I predict now that the results won't be popular.
Except with a small subset of GOP voters.
Tariffs and immigration are the big question marks. I suspect he will do a lot less on both than he has promised, but just enough to keep them regularly in the headlines.
What Trump wants, of course, is for the Democrats to stop him from implementing his policies. Then he has an enemy. Someone who is standing in the way of him carrying out his promises.
The Democrats should welcome the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the introduction of tariffs. I mean they'll be shitty for the American people and all, but at least it would mean people would be able to see the impact of those moves.
Yes, which is ironically why the Democrats do NOT want to scrape a win in the House having already lost the Presidency and Senate.
Full GOP control of the White House and Congress to implement Trumpism in tooth and claw is their best hope of a swingback in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race
The Republicans controlled the White House, Senate and Congress from 2000 to 2006 - they lost both the Senate and House in the 2006 midterms and of course the Presidency in 2008. The House was regained by the Republicans in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016.
It's perfectly possible the Democrats will regain Congress in 2026 - the Senate seats to be contested are 20 Republican and 13 Democrat but if the background mood is right the Democrats could take enough Republican seats to wipe out the 54-44 (or 53-45) lead.
Clinton of course spectacularly lost Congress to Newt Gingrich and the Senate to Bob Dole in 1994 but went on to beat Dole comfortably in the 1996 Presidential election.
Clinton could run again in 1996, Trump can't run again in 2028 and of course the economy was much better in 1996 unlike now especially once Trump's tariffs kick in
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
We didna ken! Well, ye ken the noo!
See also: tarrifs. And most of the other stuff he has said he will do.
The Trump genius was to persuade loads of people that he would do the thing they wanted, but the stuff they didn't want was just a blag. The Trump supergenius was to persuade different people about this for different things.
To be clear- not because voters are stupid, but because Trump is a supergenius at this sort of thing.
any voters taken in by Trump are very stupid
But maybe he is just lucky in delivering poor policy in lucky ways. If some huge number of people believe in Religion, then surely plain old luck has to get a look in.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
given the current consensus is that low skill immigration is a drain on the economy each return probably makes money in the long term. Can you face up to that ?
Surely, like anything else, the answer is "it depends".
I mean, would you really argue the low skilled immigration to Dubai and the UAE, or to Singapore, been a drain on their economies?
So I suspect it depends on the part of the country and on the industry. It is also worth remembering that the parts of the US that have seen the most stagnant economies, are the ones with the least low skilled immigration. (Albeit, I suspect that the causation is the other way around.)
Most of Dubai and the UAE is desert and they have largely immigrant populations with lots of oil wealth for the native population too.
Singapore is an ultra low tax city state with the most educated population in the world
Dubai doesn't have any oil.
And Singapore chooses to educate their citizens, and then import low skilled workers.
Personally, I think the Singapore model is smarter than not educating your citizens well. I mean, I don't dream of my kids working as cleaners.
Oriental East Asians also have the highest average IQs in the world, it is partly inherited intelligence as much as a good education system that puts Singapore top
Some thoughts on the 4 by-elections up here today.
A grand slam by the Tories, taking all 4 off the SNP. LD vote share up in all 4 seats, including some +15% action SNP share down in 3 of the 4, only gaining any ground in Fraserburgh (seat vacated by Seamus Logan MP) Reform a clear and growing threat to the Tories, despite their grand slam of wins. Only 38% off the Reform vote transferred over to the Tories once ReFUK were defeated
As a LibDem team we're pretty happy - picking up any of the seats would have been a bonus, and we can show continued progress.
What does it mean for wider Scottish politics?
Reform won't get anywhere. Their candidate in Fraserburgh was a prominent local businessman and he still only came 3rd. Their only role is a spoiler for the Tories
The SNP slide continues. Notable was that they had a serious lack of a team for these ones, having to pull in councillors & MSPs to cover their lack of bodies to canvas, and materials written centrally and not by the local teams. Unless Swinney can arrest the slide they are in deep trouble come 2026.
The Tories are flying, benefitting from a clear "stop/punish the SNP" vote, and aided by having well organised and resourced campaigns. If their new leader can get past the inherited mess and put out a positive vision, they could be a serious threat again as they last were under Ruth Davidson. Won't help them in the central belt, but outside there are plenty of seats to pick up
Liberal Democrats? The NE isn't our strongest area, despite being in coalition power in both the shire and Aberdeen city. But we continue to strengthen and organise and build little power bases, and we all know how pervasive we can be once we get under the foundations
Hard to speak for Labour or the Greens. Neither really exist up here
If Labour carry on being awful, if the SNP slide doesn't abate, and if Con & LD shares continue to rise, we could be in for a truly divided Holyrood after the election...
Looks like an SNP minority government reliant on Tory confidence and supply on Scottish polls and local election results. The Tories first shot back at any form of national power could come at Holyrood therefore before Westminster and the Senedd
You are a long long way away. I know quite a few of the local Tories now. There is NO WAY they would do a deal with the SNP.
I also know quite a few of the SNP. The loathing is mutual! Unless the SNP were right on the cusp of a majority I cannot see how any party would work with them. We would talk to them as we work with everyone, but I doubt the terms would be acceptable.
They did in 2007 and they may not prop up Labour either. Kate Forbes is closer economically and culturally to the Tories than most of Scottish Labour are.
Otherwise it would have to be some form of SNP + Greens + LDs deal
That sounds less unlikely to me, though I am not there either. Note of course that there doesn't HAVE to be a deal.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
It's the enquiries, appeals and legal fees before they get permission to train one which add up.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
We didna ken! Well, ye ken the noo!
See also: tarrifs. And most of the other stuff he has said he will do.
The Trump genius was to persuade loads of people that he would do the thing they wanted, but the stuff they didn't want was just a blag. The Trump supergenius was to persuade different people about this for different things.
To be clear- not because voters are stupid, but because Trump is a supergenius at this sort of thing.
any voters taken in by Trump are very stupid
But maybe he is just lucky in delivering poor policy in lucky ways. If some huge number of people believe in Religion, then surely plain old luck has to get a look in.
He is good at the rhetoric for dumb people who have short attention span, he is like a SUN headline , the story is actually totally different but the dummies don't get beyond the big headline and a picture. He is an entertainer.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
Yes, I think you have a point there. I was going to throw in another paragraph about Habermas and base/superstructure which would roughly correspond to your thoughts on resource extraction vs resource exploitation (but threw it out as it sounded too pretentious).
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
given the current consensus is that low skill immigration is a drain on the economy each return probably makes money in the long term. Can you face up to that ?
Surely, like anything else, the answer is "it depends".
I mean, would you really argue the low skilled immigration to Dubai and the UAE, or to Singapore, been a drain on their economies?
So I suspect it depends on the part of the country and on the industry. It is also worth remembering that the parts of the US that have seen the most stagnant economies, are the ones with the least low skilled immigration. (Albeit, I suspect that the causation is the other way around.)
Also, “the long term” doesn’t mean 2028.
Also, such dramatic a change to the US economy would to create a lot of losers. Don’t forget Biden did great on the economy… and got panned for it.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
We didna ken! Well, ye ken the noo!
See also: tarrifs. And most of the other stuff he has said he will do.
The Trump genius was to persuade loads of people that he would do the thing they wanted, but the stuff they didn't want was just a blag. The Trump supergenius was to persuade different people about this for different things.
To be clear- not because voters are stupid, but because Trump is a supergenius at this sort of thing.
any voters taken in by Trump are very stupid
But maybe he is just lucky in delivering poor policy in lucky ways. If some huge number of people believe in Religion, then surely plain old luck has to get a look in.
He is good at the rhetoric for dumb people who have short attention span, he is like a SUN headline , the story is actually totally different but the dummies don't get beyond the big headline and a picture. He is an entertainer.
Assuming free and fair elections in 2028, don't expect an incumbency bonus for any GOP Congress members.
Why would you assume that wouldn't be popular?
Let's see, shall we ?
Much depends on what Trump actually does, as I must have repeated at least a dozen times now. But if he's really going to go ahead and try for 10m plus deportations, as his comments at least imply, then I predict now that the results won't be popular.
Except with a small subset of GOP voters.
Tariffs and immigration are the big question marks. I suspect he will do a lot less on both than he has promised, but just enough to keep them regularly in the headlines.
What Trump wants, of course, is for the Democrats to stop him from implementing his policies. Then he has an enemy. Someone who is standing in the way of him carrying out his promises.
The Democrats should welcome the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the introduction of tariffs. I mean they'll be shitty for the American people and all, but at least it would mean people would be able to see the impact of those moves.
He will control all three branches. What the Democrats do doesn’t matter.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
China makes a lot of stuff which despite the regrettability about dealing with China represents good value for the British consumer. It also makes a lot of stuff the British consumer could do quite happily without. I keep, for example, getting an advert for a bit of plastic the purpose of which - as far as I can see - is to keep your big toe separate from its neighbour. There is tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of shit like this. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of us. There is a lot of scope to import rather less from China without impacting our quality of life one iota. I've always been a keen free trader but looking at the volumes of stuff that has needed to be periodically cleared out of my house since I became a parent has made me wonder whether I was wrong all along.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
I don’t know how closely we align politically but I always find your posts interesting and I find very little to disagree with.
I think if Labour wants to win again, it’s going to have make progress on immigration and the economy. But that means changes that working people can actually feel. That’s the crucial thing.
I am not sure how relevant the culture war really is, I am not sure people are really voting on that basis and to be honest SKS doesn’t strike me as very interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
Thoughts?
Culture war stuff is revanchist window dressing to a deeper feeling of western supremacy dying away. South Park had it best with their 'memberberries' skit. People remember when things used to be better, but falsely correlate that to times when people were less liberal and openminded. We were just richer, was all.
Immigration is a problem, because GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2008. People are happy with immigration when they feel it benefits them. If they feel they're competing for ever scarcer resources, less so. We haven't built enough houses, schools, roads, railways, prisons, really anything to keep up with the huge increase in population. Because we can't afford it. It's the old 'look after your own before you look after others' writ large. Hence why people are incensed by the three billion a year hotel bill for asylum seekers.
Politically my views are a mad hodge-podge of autodidactic thought, I often describe myself as 'a libertarian who thought Marx had the right diagnosis but the wrong solution' although I'm no longer sure what the right answers are. I'm good at poking holes in things and pointing out the problems, less certain any more that I have any answers.
I'm tempted to agree with Ray Dallio that we are simply witnessing the end of an era in which one empire had total control (and from which we largely benefited as a satellite state of the US) into a world that looks multipolar, but will probably be dominated by one of the emerging economies within the next twenty or so years.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Easily - staff are expensive.
I did a town planning masters'. Granted what I paid <> what it cost, but it was just lectures. I'd estimate it cost rather less than the tuition fees. It was a one year course. And then I was a planning officer. Granted there's some on the job training after that, but that doesn't even amount to tens of thousands of pounds, let alone hundreds.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Easily - staff are expensive.
I did a town planning masters'. Granted what I paid <> what it cost, but it was just lectures. I'd estimate it cost rather less than the tuition fees. It was a one year course. And then I was a planning officer. Granted there's some on the job training after that, but that doesn't even amount to tens of thousands of pounds, let alone hundreds.
I suppose it depends on what the policy is - if it's 3 years position + training + qualifications then it adds up.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
Yes, I think you have a point there. I was going to throw in another paragraph about Habermas and base/superstructure which would roughly correspond to your thoughts on resource extraction vs resource exploitation (but threw it out as it sounded too pretentious).
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
But it isn't as simple as no jobs and opportunities. It's no jobs at six figures (in the US) for the unskilled. Examples from the culture. Victor Meldrew retired as a security guard to a semi detached in the Home Counties. The Simpsons live in a detached house in a nice part of town with five people living on one income which requires no skiis or qualifications. Neither of these was considered preposterous in the 80's/90's. I'm not seeing how you get any of that back.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
China makes a lot of stuff which despite the regrettability about dealing with China represents good value for the British consumer. It also makes a lot of stuff the British consumer could do quite happily without. I keep, for example, getting an advert for a bit of plastic the purpose of which - as far as I can see - is to keep your big toe separate from its neighbour. There is tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of shit like this. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of us. There is a lot of scope to import rather less from China without impacting our quality of life one iota. I've always been a keen free trader but looking at the volumes of stuff that has needed to be periodically cleared out of my house since I became a parent has made me wonder whether I was wrong all along.
But this is exactly what a really good capitalist state looks like. "Want to find a bot that takes your flat-cap from your head to a hatstand as you arrive home"
What's failing is anything like quality control, and that's just because the Amazon's of this world are entirely happy to perpetuate fiction. The sellers of goods need to get out of the business of rating the goods.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
Yes, I think you have a point there. I was going to throw in another paragraph about Habermas and base/superstructure which would roughly correspond to your thoughts on resource extraction vs resource exploitation (but threw it out as it sounded too pretentious).
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
Like Robert, I’m not convinced by this “epochal shift”.
It’s a short term cry of frustration, IMO. And anything much beyond carefully crafted tariffs intended not to kill trade, but to nudge it in the US’s favour, is not going to be popular with those it was sold to.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
Yes, I think you have a point there. I was going to throw in another paragraph about Habermas and base/superstructure which would roughly correspond to your thoughts on resource extraction vs resource exploitation (but threw it out as it sounded too pretentious).
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
But it isn't as simple as no jobs and opportunities. It's no jobs at six figures (in the US) for the unskilled. Examples from the culture. Victor Meldrew retired as a security guard to a semi detached in the Home Counties. The Simpsons live in a detached house in a nice part of town with five people living on one income which requires no skiis or qualifications. Neither of these was considered preposterous in the 80's/90's. I'm not seeing how you get any of that back.
Norman Stanley Fletcher lived in a rather nice suburban terraced house in Going Straight despite his career as a low level criminal. (Indeed, this also wasn't unheard of in the 80s; there were such characters on my suburban middle class housing estate when I was growing up.)
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Easily - staff are expensive.
I did a town planning masters'. Granted what I paid <> what it cost, but it was just lectures. I'd estimate it cost rather less than the tuition fees. It was a one year course. And then I was a planning officer. Granted there's some on the job training after that, but that doesn't even amount to tens of thousands of pounds, let alone hundreds.
Does the cash also pay for the employment of the extra planning officers ?
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
It has to be Mandelson from that list.
He has a way of charming people. Miliband would be a disaster, imho - too sure he is right and the whole biggest 'brain in the room' thing is gonna be total rat poison to Trump. Ashton is very experienced diplomat but Trump is gonna want to deal with some star quality.
I am highly sceptical that this is the real, full short list however.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
I don’t know how closely we align politically but I always find your posts interesting and I find very little to disagree with.
I think if Labour wants to win again, it’s going to have make progress on immigration and the economy. But that means changes that working people can actually feel. That’s the crucial thing.
I am not sure how relevant the culture war really is, I am not sure people are really voting on that basis and to be honest SKS doesn’t strike me as very interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
Thoughts?
Culture war stuff is revanchist window dressing to a deeper feeling of western supremacy dying away. South Park had it best with their 'memberberries' skit. People remember when things used to be better, but falsely correlate that to times when people were less liberal and openminded. We were just richer, was all.
Immigration is a problem, because GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2008. People are happy with immigration when they feel it benefits them. If they feel they're competing for ever scarcer resources, less so. We haven't built enough houses, schools, roads, railways, prisons, really anything to keep up with the huge increase in population. Because we can't afford it. It's the old 'look after your own before you look after others' writ large. Hence why people are incensed by the three billion a year hotel bill for asylum seekers.
Politically my views are a mad hodge-podge of autodidactic thought, I often describe myself as 'a libertarian who thought Marx had the right diagnosis but the wrong solution' although I'm no longer sure what the right answers are. I'm good at poking holes in things and pointing out the problems, less certain any more that I have any answers.
I'm tempted to agree with Ray Dallio that we are simply witnessing the end of an era in which one empire had total control (and from which we largely benefited as a satellite state of the US) into a world that looks multipolar, but will probably be dominated by one of the emerging economies within the next twenty or so years.
I think there's rather more to culture war stuff than that. To take the most egregious examples, people would be cross about murders by mad Islamists or about their daughters having to compete against boys who declared themselves to be girls even if they were splendidly rich.
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Easily - staff are expensive.
I did a town planning masters'. Granted what I paid <> what it cost, but it was just lectures. I'd estimate it cost rather less than the tuition fees. It was a one year course. And then I was a planning officer. Granted there's some on the job training after that, but that doesn't even amount to tens of thousands of pounds, let alone hundreds.
Does the cash also pay for the employment of the extra planning officers ?
It must do, surely, as Eabhal suggests. We can't be spending money that inefficiently (*cough* bat tunnel *cough*).
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
There's a lot of truth in that, but you do need to add one additional element to the analysis.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
Yes, I think you have a point there. I was going to throw in another paragraph about Habermas and base/superstructure which would roughly correspond to your thoughts on resource extraction vs resource exploitation (but threw it out as it sounded too pretentious).
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
Like Robert, I’m not convinced by this “epochal shift”.
It’s a short term cry of frustration, IMO. And anything much beyond carefully crafted tariffs intended not to kill trade, but to nudge it in the US’s favour, is not going to be popular with those it was sold to.
This is *probably* as close to an explainer of what I think is happening as you'll get.
(Ray Dallio on the Changing World Order, the whole thing is useful but you can start at around 30 minutes in if you want to cover off the ground I've hypothesised in my earlier posts)
Western economies are in terminal decline. I don't think it's a short term cry of frustration, but part of a wider epochal shift away from total western dominance, in which global free trade primarily served to enrich the west, to a new era where it actually impoverishes us, as we are no longer producers but consumers.
We are left with the question, would you rather be a poor producer or a rich consumer. We chose 'rich consumer' without realising we were consuming more than we could afford, putting it all on the national credit card, then when the bill came due had nothing left to pay with.
The reaction to that is people saying, well, we should go back to being relatively poorer but being producers rather than consumers again.
In simple terms: it ain't much, but it's honest work.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
China makes a lot of stuff which despite the regrettability about dealing with China represents good value for the British consumer. It also makes a lot of stuff the British consumer could do quite happily without. I keep, for example, getting an advert for a bit of plastic the purpose of which - as far as I can see - is to keep your big toe separate from its neighbour. There is tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of shit like this. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of us. There is a lot of scope to import rather less from China without impacting our quality of life one iota. I've always been a keen free trader but looking at the volumes of stuff that has needed to be periodically cleared out of my house since I became a parent has made me wonder whether I was wrong all along.
But this is exactly what a really good capitalist state looks like. "Want to find a bot that takes your flat-cap from your head to a hatstand as you arrive home"
What's failing is anything like quality control, and that's just because the Amazon's of this world are entirely happy to perpetuate fiction. The sellers of goods need to get out of the business of rating the goods.
What we need is a stupid imports tarriff. How do we decide what's stupid? I propose a well-paid committee. You, me, Robert, kyf_100, Sunil, Eabhal for a start. Anyone else who happens to be around. Sure we can sort tge wheat from the chaff.
"A quite stupefying ignorance that makes him unfit to be the President of the United States."
David Lammy strikes again.
Oh no, it was Boris Johnson.
What role does Boris have in government now?
I am just wondering if anyone brought up his past comments on Trump when the Tories were dealing with Trump. I certainly don't remember you doing so but I may be wrong.
"A quite stupefying ignorance that makes him unfit to be the President of the United States."
David Lammy strikes again.
Oh no, it was Boris Johnson.
What role does Boris have in government now?
Leader of the 'Over-the-water, down the little alley, then turn right, and ring the bell, and if not shout' movement. Influential at the Spectator I'm told.
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
China makes a lot of stuff which despite the regrettability about dealing with China represents good value for the British consumer. It also makes a lot of stuff the British consumer could do quite happily without. I keep, for example, getting an advert for a bit of plastic the purpose of which - as far as I can see - is to keep your big toe separate from its neighbour. There is tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of shit like this. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of us. There is a lot of scope to import rather less from China without impacting our quality of life one iota. I've always been a keen free trader but looking at the volumes of stuff that has needed to be periodically cleared out of my house since I became a parent has made me wonder whether I was wrong all along.
But this is exactly what a really good capitalist state looks like. "Want to find a bot that takes your flat-cap from your head to a hatstand as you arrive home"
What's failing is anything like quality control, and that's just because the Amazon's of this world are entirely happy to perpetuate fiction. The sellers of goods need to get out of the business of rating the goods.
What we need is a stupid imports tariff. How do we decide what's stupid? I propose a well-paid committee. You, me, Robert, kyf_100, Sunil, Eabhal for a start. Anyone else who happens to be around. Sure we can sort the wheat from the chaff.
I propose that we need to be able to distinguish the stupid from the merely silly!
"We spend $350 million each week on Chinese tat. Let's increase the cost to $450 million instead."
As not featured on the side of a GOP bus.
What we are witnessing is an epochal shift in the orthodoxy, perhaps the first one in my lifetime.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
I don’t know how closely we align politically but I always find your posts interesting and I find very little to disagree with.
I think if Labour wants to win again, it’s going to have make progress on immigration and the economy. But that means changes that working people can actually feel. That’s the crucial thing.
I am not sure how relevant the culture war really is, I am not sure people are really voting on that basis and to be honest SKS doesn’t strike me as very interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
Thoughts?
Culture war stuff is revanchist window dressing to a deeper feeling of western supremacy dying away. South Park had it best with their 'memberberries' skit. People remember when things used to be better, but falsely correlate that to times when people were less liberal and openminded. We were just richer, was all.
Immigration is a problem, because GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2008. People are happy with immigration when they feel it benefits them. If they feel they're competing for ever scarcer resources, less so. We haven't built enough houses, schools, roads, railways, prisons, really anything to keep up with the huge increase in population. Because we can't afford it. It's the old 'look after your own before you look after others' writ large. Hence why people are incensed by the three billion a year hotel bill for asylum seekers.
Politically my views are a mad hodge-podge of autodidactic thought, I often describe myself as 'a libertarian who thought Marx had the right diagnosis but the wrong solution' although I'm no longer sure what the right answers are. I'm good at poking holes in things and pointing out the problems, less certain any more that I have any answers.
I'm tempted to agree with Ray Dallio that we are simply witnessing the end of an era in which one empire had total control (and from which we largely benefited as a satellite state of the US) into a world that looks multipolar, but will probably be dominated by one of the emerging economies within the next twenty or so years.
I think there's rather more to culture war stuff than that. To take the most egregious examples, people would be cross about murders by mad Islamists or about their daughters having to compete against boys who declared themselves to be girls even if they were splendidly rich.
While there are certainly issues around trans women in sport (I'm against, as I've mentioned several times), they are the side salad to the doner kebab that is the actual meat of the problem: terminal economic decline in the west.
I regard the obsession over things like trans and so on to be an example of bikeshedding: people obsessing over a totemic but irregular issue in which there are a very small number of marginal cases (most people have never met a trans person, let alone competed against one in competitive sport, nor do any of the trans people I know compete in any kind of sporting events), yet absolutely all of us are affected on a daily basis by the economic decline all around us.
Trans people are not responsible for house prices being 10x your income or the price of a meal out doubling in the last couple of years.
I do agree with you on the problem of cultural relativism. I mostly want to live around people who share my liberal views. Many other cultures do not. But equally so, I'm not sure those chaps who were stopping cars up in Middlesborough asking if the occupants were white or not were interested in women's or LGBT rights.
By far the best thing Labour has done so far is centralising planning to stop these applications being rejected.
I'd much rather there was some sort of incentive for LAs to approve developments than have central government override them. Then you'd get the best of both worlds - more houses/infrastucture + local insights to make them more efficient.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
What?! It costs £166,000 to train a planning officer?!
Easily - staff are expensive.
obviously joking, it is not a 15 year degree course they are taking
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
I thought Karen Pierce was staying on . She’s very well respected .
"A quite stupefying ignorance that makes him unfit to be the President of the United States."
David Lammy strikes again.
Oh no, it was Boris Johnson.
What role does Boris have in government now?
I am just wondering if anyone brought up his past comments on Trump when the Tories were dealing with Trump. I certainly don't remember you doing so but I may be wrong.
The past is another country. Here and now is worth talking about. Lammy is potentially a problem, indeed there are many Labour MPs who will find the need to work with Trump quite difficult. Let's hope they can be grownups.
"A quite stupefying ignorance that makes him unfit to be the President of the United States."
David Lammy strikes again.
Oh no, it was Boris Johnson.
What role does Boris have in government now?
I am just wondering if anyone brought up his past comments on Trump when the Tories were dealing with Trump. I certainly don't remember you doing so but I may be wrong.
The past is another country. Here and now is worth talking about. Lammy is potentially a problem, indeed there are many Labour MPs who will find the need to work with Trump quite difficult. Let's hope they can be grownups.
So why can't Lammy's comments also be in the past?
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
It has to be Mandelson from that list.
He has a way of charming people. Miliband would be a disaster, imho - too sure he is right and the whole biggest 'brain in the room' thing is gonna be total rat poison to Trump. Ashton is very experienced diplomat but Trump is gonna want to deal with some star quality.
I am highly sceptical that this is the real, full short list however.
Petie has to be the one. A chance to use that shared Epstein experience for king and country.
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
He is trying to resurrect the Blair government but he is no Blair
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
Guess what. It's none of Trump's fucking business.
I thought you couldn’t give exemptions under WTO rules unless you have a FTA . Regardless if Starmer wants to poll in single digits he should go ahead and trash EU relations and turn into Trumps gimp .
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
He is trying to resurrect the Blair government but he is no Blair
These are all talented people.
Question is which one will Trump actually like. That is the main question when dealing with him as far as I can see.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
He is trying to resurrect the Blair government but he is no Blair
These are all talented people.
Question is which one will Trump actually like. That is the main question when dealing with him as far as I can see.
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
Guess what. It's none of Trump's fucking business.
I thought you couldn’t give exemptions under WTO rules unless you have a FTA . Regardless if Starmer wants to poll in single digits he should go ahead and trash EU relations and turn into Trumps gimp .
I fear you will have 4 years of this and many on the left are in absolute despair
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
The thing is, people have legitimately voted for Trump. There's no "but" this time, no rigging, no "but he actually lost the popular vote".
A small part of me thinks that if he's as bad as last time, it will be the end of this kind of politics for good. The people voted for it after all.
I know he wants to come back but arguably getting full-Johnson here finished off that era of Tory politics. For all I dislike about her, Badenoch is not Boris Johnson and is operating in a completely different way.
Of course Trump may also somehow be an absolute miracle worker and be really good. I'm happy to credit him where he does well. On Ukraine I am intensely sceptical but I have long believed the current position is untenable.
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
Just wait till Latinos who voted Trump get caught up in the deportations as there’s bound to be those who are legal but errors are bound to happen.
It might sound like schadenfreude but I won’t shedding a single iota of sympathy for anyone who voted for Trump and then ends up being screwed by his administration.
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
He is trying to resurrect the Blair government but he is no Blair
But the big bonus working in his favour is that Reeves is no Brown.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
The United States made Shirley Temple an Ambassador. What would be our equivalent for this appointment? Billie Piper?
Holly Willoughby would be an eye catching appointment.
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
WTF, Starmer is an even bigger clown than I thought possible.
He is trying to resurrect the Blair government but he is no Blair
But the big bonus working in his favour is that Reeves is no Brown.
Consider this - everything that is happening at Boca Chica, the development of the largest rocket in history, the production line for it, and the production lines for the engines, costs about $1 billion dollars a year. Each test launch is $90 million.
For 7.75 bat cages for trains, a year, we could have a space program which would give us the ability to land the entire DfE on the Sun.
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
Guess what. It's none of Trump's fucking business.
I thought you couldn’t give exemptions under WTO rules unless you have a FTA . Regardless if Starmer wants to poll in single digits he should go ahead and trash EU relations and turn into Trumps gimp .
I fear you will have 4 years of this and many on the left are in absolute despair
This isn’t 2016 , that was a huge shock . This time my sympathy is a big fat zero . People knew exactly what they were voting for. As for Starmer , he can’t surely be that stupid to trash EU relations to beg for scraps from Trump . We need closer ties with the EU and can’t rely on the US in terms of defence .Europe needs to wake up .
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
Just wait till Latinos who voted Trump get caught up in the deportations as there’s bound to be those who are legal but errors are bound to happen.
It might sound like schadenfreude but I won’t shedding a single iota of sympathy for anyone who voted for Trump and then ends up being screwed by his administration.
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich @RBReich · 19m A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
Just wait till Latinos who voted Trump get caught up in the deportations as there’s bound to be those who are legal but errors are bound to happen.
It might sound like schadenfreude but I won’t shedding a single iota of sympathy for anyone who voted for Trump and then ends up being screwed by his administration.
Look at thee mess that happened with the Windrush scandal, due to poor documentation (often by the authorities, not the individuals). I have very little faith that processes and documentation for legalised immigrants in the USA is much better, especially for the poor.
There's no point shouting into the void @nico679. Democrats lost and the Republicans won fair and square. Figure out where they went wrong and change. Move back towards the voters.
They need to change, just like Labour did.
I went through all of this after 2019. Once you get out of the echo chamber you will be better for it, believe me.
Angela Rayner has called in an application for 8,400 homes just *three hours* before it was due to go to planning committee with a recommendation for refusal.
Lionel Barber @lionelbarber I can confirm from a Trump source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
Guess what. It's none of Trump's fucking business.
I thought you couldn’t give exemptions under WTO rules unless you have a FTA . Regardless if Starmer wants to poll in single digits he should go ahead and trash EU relations and turn into Trumps gimp .
I fear you will have 4 years of this and many on the left are in absolute despair
This isn’t 2016 , that was a huge shock . This time my sympathy is a big fat zero . People knew exactly what they were voting for. As for Starmer , he can’t surely be that stupid to trash EU relations to beg for scraps from Trump . We need closer ties with the EU and can’t rely on the US in terms of defence .Europe needs to wake up .
Starmer is in the middle of a tug of war, but then the US is our largest trading partner and defence ally and no UK PM is going to put that at risk
A decision on a new US ambassador is likely to be taken within days, with David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Cathy Ashton all on the shortlist, the Guardian understands.
Guardian
Well that'll improve things 😞😞😞😞😞
The United States made Shirley Temple an Ambassador. What would be our equivalent for this appointment? Billie Piper?
Holly Willoughby would be an eye catching appointment.
I would like to see Helen Skelton get it. 👍🏻
Surely Prince Andrew is the best option. Needs money and a home, he has mutual friends and pastimes with Donald.
On other matters I’m impressed/surprised that the Guardian are not hiding from negative stories about the Labour government.
I am not opposed to a UK-US trade deal, I am finding it odd for the UK to not try and pursue one just because it's Trump.
They want to give us their dodgy food. We don't want it. Its not going to happen regardless of who is in charge (well maybe Farage-Trump but their schedules as leaders are unlikely to overlap).
Comments
https://x.com/Paul_SLG/status/1854893878542844298
Some positive steps finally. Build those houses.
Full GOP control of the White House and Congress to implement Trumpism in tooth and claw is their best hope of a swingback in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race
Ultimately, if you want to bring your economy into balance, you need to raise the domestic savings rate. That - I'm afraid - would not be pretty.
Dubai has a very small amount of oil.
Next door Abu Dhabi, by contrast, produces close to 5 million barrels per day. That's a 100-fold difference.
I actually think the best thing they have done is spend £50 million on training 300 new planning officers for councils.
The post-WWII economic order was underpinned by the idea that free trade makes everyone richer, and the freer the market, the freer the people, and so on.
This was an orthodoxy spread by Western nations on the basis that it enriched western nations. And for a while, it worked. It enabled global GDP to grow immeasurably and we benefited, in the form of cheap everything.
Then, somewhere along the line, it stopped working for Western nations. This probably started somewhere in the 80s. We couldn't out-compete developing nations as manufacturers, so we became service economies. This great restructuring led to some winners (the service sector) at the expense of the losers (manual workers), creating an increasing gap between rich and poor in Western nations.
But then, globalization reached a tipping point. The primary beneficiaries were no longer the western nations that spread this free trade orthodoxy, but the eager developing nations who gradually began to take jobs, wealth and opportunity away from western nations, while developing service economies of their own - leaving us with less and less to trade.
As a consequence western nations, refusing to accept declining living standards, lived 'on the credit card' for far too long. Increasing financialisation led to the credit crunch, from which most Western economies never recovered. Still refusing to accept declining living standards, we borrowed more and more, all the while our economies went into further stagnation or decline.
Now, finally, the West is wising up to the idea that global free trade doesn't enrich the West half as much as we thought it did. Our economies are on their knees, flooded with cheap tat from foreign factories, with hollowed out town centres and asset prices (e.g. housing) far in excess of our ability to pay for those assets through our own labour.
And people are bloody annoyed about it. Hence Trump (x2), hence Brexit, and so on.
So finally the epochal certainty that free trade is best for the West is coming to an end. Because while it has made a small elite richer, most people feel poorer - despite the abundance of cheap tat to buy.
TL;DR, for most of our lifetimes, the Western Liberal Orthodoxy has been completely focused around free trade, because it benefited us. Now the developing nations we previously exploited have caught up, and are, in many respects, exploiting us, Western voters are using what little power they have to elect governments that belatedly challenge this orthodoxy, onshore jobs and opportunities, and reverse what they see as the terminal decline of the last two decades.
Here is how it broke:
Lake: 58%
Gallego: 40%
Lake nets 4,154 from the batch.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9njklv5d8o
It's perfectly possible the Democrats will regain Congress in 2026 - the Senate seats to be contested are 20 Republican and 13 Democrat but if the background mood is right the Democrats could take enough Republican seats to wipe out the 54-44 (or 53-45) lead.
Clinton of course spectacularly lost Congress to Newt Gingrich and the Senate to Bob Dole in 1994 but went on to beat Dole comfortably in the 1996 Presidential election.
And that is that the living standards we achieved in the pre-globalisation world (when we manufactured) were dependent on the import of raw materials from the developing world. Effectively we bought raw materials cheaply, and then the value was our labour in turning them into manufactured products that we could sell, and buy lots of raw materials.
So we can't go back to world where we had a monopoly of knowledge of how to make shit, and that monopoly allowed us to be rich, because now we have to compete with Chinese and Koreans and Philippinos who also know the secret of manufacturing.
We need to have exports, to afford to import the things that we need to make shit. And if someone else is prepared to it for less, then how do tariffs work in our favour?
I think if Labour wants to win again, it’s going to have make progress on immigration and the economy. But that means changes that working people can actually feel. That’s the crucial thing.
I am not sure how relevant the culture war really is, I am not sure people are really voting on that basis and to be honest SKS doesn’t strike me as very interested in that kind of stuff anyway.
Thoughts?
In many ways, I think it is my best video, even though it only got something like 10k views.
That is so far from what I thought was the case.
Note of course that there doesn't HAVE to be a deal.
But I didn't quite consider your point about the monopoly of knowing how to make shit. Which everyone does, now. So how does the West compete? We're quite happy to buy the latest iPhone, but I can't imagine anyone used to Western living standards volunteering to work in a Foxconn factory.
I'm not saying tariffs are the correct answer, just noting that the current challenge to the post WWII free trade orthodoxy is a knee-jerk reaction to the declining power of the West. People are realising the old orthodoxy isn't enriching them any more, so are voting for alternative solutions.
On the one hand, tariffs are going to make everything more expensive and reduce global GDP, making everyone poorer. But if you're a voter in a rust belt state with no jobs and no opportunities, perhaps you'd welcome the return of industry and the chance to work in a factory. You might be able to buy less tat, but at least you'll be able to work and share in some of the wealth you create.
Also, such dramatic a change to the US economy would to create a lot of losers.
Don’t forget Biden did great on the economy… and got panned for it.
What the Democrats do doesn’t matter.
It also makes a lot of stuff the British consumer could do quite happily without. I keep, for example, getting an advert for a bit of plastic the purpose of which - as far as I can see - is to keep your big toe separate from its neighbour. There is tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of shit like this. I often wonder what the workers in Chinese factories think of us. There is a lot of scope to import rather less from China without impacting our quality of life one iota.
I've always been a keen free trader but looking at the volumes of stuff that has needed to be periodically cleared out of my house since I became a parent has made me wonder whether I was wrong all along.
Immigration is a problem, because GDP per capita has been stagnant since 2008. People are happy with immigration when they feel it benefits them. If they feel they're competing for ever scarcer resources, less so. We haven't built enough houses, schools, roads, railways, prisons, really anything to keep up with the huge increase in population. Because we can't afford it. It's the old 'look after your own before you look after others' writ large. Hence why people are incensed by the three billion a year hotel bill for asylum seekers.
Politically my views are a mad hodge-podge of autodidactic thought, I often describe myself as 'a libertarian who thought Marx had the right diagnosis but the wrong solution' although I'm no longer sure what the right answers are. I'm good at poking holes in things and pointing out the problems, less certain any more that I have any answers.
I'm tempted to agree with Ray Dallio that we are simply witnessing the end of an era in which one empire had total control (and from which we largely benefited as a satellite state of the US) into a world that looks multipolar, but will probably be dominated by one of the emerging economies within the next twenty or so years.
Guardian
It's no jobs at six figures (in the US) for the unskilled.
Examples from the culture. Victor Meldrew retired as a security guard to a semi detached in the Home Counties.
The Simpsons live in a detached house in a nice part of town with five people living on one income which requires no skiis or qualifications.
Neither of these was considered preposterous in the 80's/90's.
I'm not seeing how you get any of that back.
What's failing is anything like quality control, and that's just because the Amazon's of this world are entirely happy to perpetuate fiction. The sellers of goods need to get out of the business of rating the goods.
It’s a short term cry of frustration, IMO. And anything much beyond carefully crafted tariffs intended not to kill trade, but to nudge it in the US’s favour, is not going to be popular with those it was sold to.
(Indeed, this also wasn't unheard of in the 80s; there were such characters on my suburban middle class housing estate when I was growing up.)
@lionelbarber
I can confirm from a Trump
source that a special US deal for UK is under consideration. Trump feels that neither Tory nor Labour governments have made anything of Brexit. No Singapore in the Atlantic etc. So he will set a test, pulling UK further from EU alignment. Over to you, Keir!
https://x.com/lionelbarber/status/1854944127080882404
He works for the tv network and is very well known for his data and also does live streams with the infamous “ Maricopa Incoming” !
He has a way of charming people. Miliband would be a disaster, imho - too sure he is right and the whole biggest 'brain in the room' thing is gonna be total rat poison to Trump. Ashton is very experienced diplomat but Trump is gonna want to deal with some star quality.
I am highly sceptical that this is the real, full short list however.
The results in Genesee County, where Flint is located, are fascinating.
Harris vote total: 114,632
Dem Senate candidate Slotkin: +329 votes over Harris
U.S. House Dems: +2,721 votes over Harris
Dem Sheriff Chris Swanson: +25,054 votes over Harris
https://x.com/CraigDMauger/status/1854893387452748031
(Ray Dallio on the Changing World Order, the whole thing is useful but you can start at around 30 minutes in if you want to cover off the ground I've hypothesised in my earlier posts)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8&t=1862s
Western economies are in terminal decline. I don't think it's a short term cry of frustration, but part of a wider epochal shift away from total western dominance, in which global free trade primarily served to enrich the west, to a new era where it actually impoverishes us, as we are no longer producers but consumers.
We are left with the question, would you rather be a poor producer or a rich consumer. We chose 'rich consumer' without realising we were consuming more than we could afford, putting it all on the national credit card, then when the bill came due had nothing left to pay with.
The reaction to that is people saying, well, we should go back to being relatively poorer but being producers rather than consumers again.
In simple terms: it ain't much, but it's honest work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim
Under his leadership in 1975, UN Resolution 3379 was passed
It determined "that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination"
It was eventually revoked in 1991
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3379
Trans women aren't going to be allowed in female sports.
Permanent changes are not going to be allowed to anyone until they are over the age of 18.
Not sure what happened to putting pronouns on things but I certainly don't do it.
Is this a position from which we can move on?
I regard the obsession over things like trans and so on to be an example of bikeshedding: people obsessing over a totemic but irregular issue in which there are a very small number of marginal cases (most people have never met a trans person, let alone competed against one in competitive sport, nor do any of the trans people I know compete in any kind of sporting events), yet absolutely all of us are affected on a daily basis by the economic decline all around us.
Trans people are not responsible for house prices being 10x your income or the price of a meal out doubling in the last couple of years.
I do agree with you on the problem of cultural relativism. I mostly want to live around people who share my liberal views. Many other cultures do not. But equally so, I'm not sure those chaps who were stopping cars up in Middlesborough asking if the occupants were white or not were interested in women's or LGBT rights.
Some of those effected. Maybe 100,000s of them will have voted for it to happen. 'cos of eggs.
Robert Reich
@RBReich
·
19m
A lot of people wrongly think being married to an American automatically grants citizenship. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This ruling, from a Trump-appointed judge, will rip families apart.
https://x.com/RBReich/status/1854962350828257353
Question is which one will Trump actually like. That is the main question when dealing with him as far as I can see.
I still think Starmer should get Blair into the government in some capacity.
A small part of me thinks that if he's as bad as last time, it will be the end of this kind of politics for good. The people voted for it after all.
I know he wants to come back but arguably getting full-Johnson here finished off that era of Tory politics. For all I dislike about her, Badenoch is not Boris Johnson and is operating in a completely different way.
Of course Trump may also somehow be an absolute miracle worker and be really good. I'm happy to credit him where he does well. On Ukraine I am intensely sceptical but I have long believed the current position is untenable.
It might sound like schadenfreude but I won’t shedding a single iota of sympathy for anyone who voted for Trump and then ends up being screwed by his administration.
Holly Willoughby would be an eye catching appointment.
I would like to see Helen Skelton get it. 👍🏻
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/chinas-long-term-lunar-plans-now-depend-on-developing-its-own-starship/
Consider this - everything that is happening at Boca Chica, the development of the largest rocket in history, the production line for it, and the production lines for the engines, costs about $1 billion dollars a year. Each test launch is $90 million.
For 7.75 bat cages for trains, a year, we could have a space program which would give us the ability to land the entire DfE on the Sun.
Harris 226 EVs
They need to change, just like Labour did.
I went through all of this after 2019. Once you get out of the echo chamber you will be better for it, believe me.
On other matters I’m impressed/surprised that the Guardian are not hiding from negative stories about the Labour government.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/08/relationship-between-uk-and-ukraine-has-worsened-since-labour-won-election