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.
Trump 312 EVs Harris 226 EVs
Did someone post the lady in Florida, who came across the border illegally 30 years ago, some family members recently sneaked across the border into US, so she voted for Trump specifically to send them back again.
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).
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.
This wasn’t a huge repudiation of the Dems . US elections are always close and many incumbent governments have been punished because of inflation . The Dems need to address the immigration issue in a sensible way . And it’s astonishing how Trump screwed the bi- partisan deal and suffered zero blowback for it .
I still think Starmer should get Blair into the government in some capacity.
Mandelson and Blair would both be interesting appointments in a government (and opposition) lacking real depth and change making capacity. FS and defence are going to be key roles post POTUS election. And we could do with a Chancellor who can communicate in a heavyweight manner.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
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.
A mess that has been highlighted simply to funnel money to the lawyers. Almost everyone concerned is dead or very elderly.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
"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?
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
Most of which do hard jobs in hospitality, farming and construction.
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.
Bad Al is still banging on about it was all down to sexism and racism....
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
Is that true? 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA would be about 2 million in the UK - which feels about right?
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 😞😞😞😞😞
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. 👍🏻
Holy lumping F***, what a bunch of dumb losers, surprised if any of them could tie a shoelace, especially dumbo Holly
Trump is what you get when you forget about the basics like (a) defending the border against illegal migration, (b) keeping inflation down, (c) allowing rustbelt areas to continue to decline (d) real wages being lower in 2024 than 1974. Do something about those problems and you don't get a Trump.
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.
They will get same medicine that farmers got from Brexit votes
Yesterday I heard a lady on Radio 5, who I think has written a book on the subject, talking about VAR
She's included loads of statistical analysis of the different types of decisions that VAR deals with, and sounded plausible
She believes that AI should assist VAR decisions to make them quicker
How do footy fans feel about that?
On football, Wolves v Saints tomorrow is a huge game
Sounds interesting. They could do experiments to see if instant decisions from VAR/AI would have made the right decisions 99% of the time before actually bring it in.
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!
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
Is that true? 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA would be about 2 million in the UK - which feels about right?
I would guess both are underestimates, but US Gov thinks 11 million and UK estimates vary widely, but nothing above 1 million as far as I can see - eg Migration Observatory think 700,000.
Remarkable numbers of US/UK born children to illegal migrants too, which complicates matters.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
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!
I am going to write a thread about "agency" at some point, and how some people seem to forget that they are not the only people with the ability to make decisions.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
That might work well in geographically compact Dubai, geographically compact Singapore or even an independent London but how would that work in the UK as a whole? The resources to operate such a system simply don't exist.
At a minimum, it would require a much larger enforcement operation and some form of national identity to prove either citizenship or right to remain (which would be automatically updated if there was no evidence of formal employment?)
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.
As for the "culture war", I think we will reach a middle ground now, in the US and the UK.
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?
Is that a middle ground Horse? I feel like I'm strongly gender critical (albeit I think the strongly gender critical view is the view of the majority) but I'd be broadly happy with that. I'd still be grumpy with thosewho claim to have invented a new gender, mind, but we need to draw a distinction between things we are grumpy about and things we want the state to ban.
Trump is what you get when you forget about the basics like (a) defending the border against illegal migration, (b) keeping inflation down, (c) allowing rustbelt areas to continue to decline (d) real wages being lower in 2024 than 1974. Do something about those problems and you don't get a Trump.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
If they were really worried about it, they would make it a felony to employ them.
As it is, the large employers get a supply of cheap labour, and the GOP gets a political football. What’s not to like?
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 may be hallucinating but I think I heard that Jonathan Powell (ex of Chagos, Blair coterie, Iraq dossier and other highlights) has been appointed. wcpgw?
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.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
If they were really worried about it, they would make it a felony to employ them.
As it is, the large employers get a supply of cheap labour, and the GOP gets a political football. What’s not to like?
I really did sincerely believe Harris would win. But I was not shocked that Trump won, if that makes sense. I didn't initially - and still don't completely - understand why you would vote for him but I was not shocked that people did.
I don't know why I feel more at ease, perhaps because he's got a legitimate mandate to probably fuck it up. And probably because it will force the Democrats to change, as Labour did.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
We turn out an increasing number of useless dumbos every year, the wheels are coming off the bus.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
Hang on: low skilled immigration is great, so long as they are filling jobs that the natives don't want to do because they have more skills.
The other bits are policy choices, depending on whether you want integration, and what your TFR is.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
Is that true? 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA would be about 2 million in the UK - which feels about right?
I would guess both are underestimates, but US Gov thinks 11 million and UK estimates vary widely, but nothing above 1 million as far as I can see - eg Migration Observatory think 700,000.
Remarkable numbers of US/UK born children to illegal migrants too, which complicates matters.
Does that inclide the 350,000 or so who are in the asylum queue and aren't yet technically illegal?
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
That might work well in geographically compact Dubai, geographically compact Singapore or even an independent London but how would that work in the UK as a whole? The resources to operate such a system simply don't exist.
At a minimum, it would require a much larger enforcement operation and some form of national identity to prove either citizenship or right to remain (which would be automatically updated if there was no evidence of formal employment?)
sooner they do it the better, any illegals not having a valid national identity taken to nearest por t, airport , jail and booted out.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
We turn out an increasing number of useless dumbos every year, the wheels are coming off the bus.
I'm looking for ways to stop them ending up here. Any suggestions?
As for the "culture war", I think we will reach a middle ground now, in the US and the UK.
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?
Is that a middle ground Horse? I feel like I'm strongly gender critical (albeit I think the strongly gender critical view is the view of the majority) but I'd be broadly happy with that. I'd still be grumpy with thosewho claim to have invented a new gender, mind, but we need to draw a distinction between things we are grumpy about and things we want the state to ban.
Well you tell me?
Personally I think I've moved on this issue somewhat. I really am not sure that people should be making body-changing decisions until they are eighteen. But that's not really trans specific, I feel the same about plastic surgery and so on.
Professional sports are not something that impacts my life at all but I can see the problems people have with it. I still think it's quite a niche issue in the general sense of how many trans athletes there actually are. But I do think a firm policy is needed.
On inventing a new gender, I think people say lots of things. Personally I think this is niche of niche. People want to identify as men or women, in like 99.9% of cases. Let people call themselves whatever they want but I think the law already allows for that.
I think Trump's election will put this all to bed for most people and we can move on. In the same way despite what some people here say, I think SKS has put it to bed too but others can correct me if I am wrong.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
Which goes back to prioritising thi gs which lead to increased growth and productivity. Education, tax cuts for business, infrastructure, energy should take precedence over health, pensions, WFA.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
Hang on: low skilled immigration is great, so long as they are filling jobs that the natives don't want to do because they have more skills.
The other bits are policy choices, depending on whether you want integration, and what your TFR is.
See: Singapore.
Low skilled immigration is great, so long as the immigrants themselves have few rights and are treated as second-class citizens by their host country.
It doesn’t work in an environment where it’s de facto impossible to deport someone, because they have a girlfriend or a cat, and can have taxpayer-funded lawyers arguing their case almost indefinitely.
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!
I am going to write a thread about "agency" at some point, and how some people seem to forget that they are not the only people with the ability to make decisions.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
Actions do not take place in a vacuum.
Right now Trump thinks he is king of the world. He should enjoy it because once his ideas make contact with reality it's not going to go well.
To be honest, if we can find consensus from my position or something close to it, I think we can all just move onto something else. I do think that would be good for us all.
I sincerely believe that nobody beyond a tiny few actually do not want trans people to exist. I sincerely hope we can just continue on in that spirit if we can find proper consensus on this issue.
Of course all of this will be irrelevant if the economy is in a mess anyway. I don't think the Democrats lost for being too "w word" but I have no doubt their obsession with it didn't help. I think they will move on now.
"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?
He's now Foreign secretary!
You want him to resign because he said negative things about Donald Trump in the past?
"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.
"western supremacy dying away"
Only problem with this is that it's western countries where 99.9% of migrants want to move to, not China, India, South American countries, Russia, Indonesia, etc.
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.
Even if that documentation is correct, it's quite hard to get your head around the scale of illegal immigration to the US. At least 11 million, or about 5x as many as in the UK per capita.
Is that true? 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA would be about 2 million in the UK - which feels about right?
I would guess both are underestimates, but US Gov thinks 11 million and UK estimates vary widely, but nothing above 1 million as far as I can see - eg Migration Observatory think 700,000.
Remarkable numbers of US/UK born children to illegal migrants too, which complicates matters.
That's not so much a problem in the UK, as being born there does not create any right to citizenship unless a parent is a citizen or has indefinite leave to remain. You might want to change the second half of that, but - AIUI - a pregnant asylum seeker's new baby would not have any rights to be British.
In the US, on the other hand, the 14th Amendment gives anyone born on US soil the right to US citizenship.
"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?
He's now Foreign secretary!
You want him to resign because he said negative things about Donald Trump in the past?
Trump chose a guy who called him Hitler to be his Veep. I think he's going to be ok.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Relative egalitarianism and meritocracy in the West began with the rise of communism, as an alternative economic model for the masses, and ended with its fall.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
I'm not in disagreement (heck, we've had this discussion before): I'm just pointing out that all [x] is [y] statements should usually be caveated.
The point is that low skilled immigration is great, so long as those immigrants will never claim benefits nor become citizens, and can be summarily deported if unemployed or convicted.
Hang on: low skilled immigration is great, so long as they are filling jobs that the natives don't want to do because they have more skills.
The other bits are policy choices, depending on whether you want integration, and what your TFR is.
See: Singapore.
Low skilled immigration is great, so long as the immigrants themselves have few rights and are treated as second-class citizens by their host country.
It doesn’t work in an environment where it’s de facto impossible to deport someone, because they have a girlfriend or a cat, and can have taxpayer-funded lawyers arguing their case almost indefinitely.
I don't disagree with you on the deportation issue. Clearly if immigrants commit crimes*, their visas should be revoked and they should be deported.
The issue is whether - for it to be a successful policy - that low skilled immigrants should not be allowed to integrate at all. Or indeed, earn a path to citizenship. And I think that's much more of a policy choice. Again, see Singapore.
* Maybe not traffic offences, but you get the point.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
Which goes back to prioritising thi gs which lead to increased growth and productivity. Education, tax cuts for business, infrastructure, energy should take precedence over health, pensions, WFA.
One thing I think about a lot is how democracy inherently favours short term fixes over long term solutions.
We could throw a hundred billion at education right now. And in fifteen to twenty years time we would have a super educated, high-productivity workforce able to adapt and change using a variety of transferable skills. And so on.
But it would take another ten to twenty years on top of those twenty years for the real benefits to be felt, as that generation replaced the management and entrepreneurs and so on of the previous generation.
So really there would be no noticeable benefit to chucking 100bn at education for 20 years, and you'd be lucky if you felt the full force of its impact before 40 years.
We have 5 year election cycles, and most politicians in their 40s will be dead or retired by the time we feel the actual effects of a massive increase in education spending.
So nobody does it.
To give an example: You can commission and open a new hospital in the lifetime of a Parliament, and you will see immediate effects. The full effects of improving education spending won't really be felt until twenty years down the line, even if there's a marginal improvement in the interim.
The nature of democracy means we prioritise short term investments that deliver results within the 5 year election cycle over long term investments that would result in greater productivity increases a generation down the line.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
So sort of slaves ?
Nope, paid the agreed amount for their labour. Including me.
Awfully similar to the UK temporary farm workers scheme, by the way.
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!
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
So sort of slaves ?
My wife's family are Sri Lankan, so I've read enough about how people from that part of the world are treated in the Gulf to know I will never spend a second longer in any of those countries than I need to to change planes.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
We turn out an increasing number of useless dumbos every year, the wheels are coming off the bus.
I'm looking for ways to stop them ending up here. Any suggestions?
Unless Badenoch can find another unifier of “fear Corbyn” and “get Brexit done” where are these voters going to come from?
She’d be much better off in my view doing what Trump did and going after the economy. But she’d have to offer policies to the young.
Housing, housing, housing. People are sick of being in their early 30s paying for someone else's mortgage unable to get on the ladder for themselves. Most of my friends have made it onto the ladder now but there's a lot of bitterness that remains around how much more difficult it was for us vs out parents generation because they've decided to leech off us with rental property.
The trouble is, not everybody is in their early 30s and for every voter like the one you describe there are probably three or four home counties NIMBYs who will be driven to the LibDems for fear that more houses will spoil their beautiful views, or old people who like being paper millionaires (or their kids who will inherit it one day).
And that, in short, is why our hosuing market is buggered.
You don't need to build any more houses to change the proportions of housing tenure. What happened over the last 14 years was that the number of households owning outright and renting grew, while households with mortgages fell.
More housing will certainly help with overall housing pressure, but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be snapped up by landlords and used as private rentals. It's a function of massive wealth inequality more than anything, and very difficult to fix.
Yes and no, it's a function of limited liquidity of suitable homes for first time buyers due to my parents generation buying multiple properties after Labour made their now ill fated changes to the rental sector. Fundamentally we shouldn't be in a place in this country where an individual or individuals own multiple existing properties. We should make it uneconomic to do so and push that investment from existing property into the high risk build to let sector and offer tax free income for landlord built property (not landlords buying new property from a developer) for 20 years or something.
Fundamentally we've allowed my parents generation to make risk free yield of 4-7% and risk free capital gain of 5-10% by borrowing to invest in existing property. They don't want to give it up but any party that wants to get the next generation of voters on side will need to get these people out of the market and any that want to stay as landlords should be directed to building new property with generous allowances to get them on board.
That generates new rental housing and frees up existing property for first time buyers.
8 million fewer properties and a similar population to France.
It all comes back to the artificial limits on building properties.
If I was a billionaire, I would be tempted to start building a town on some land, with getting any permission to do so.
FPT. The French example actually undermines your argument, because their housing costs are roughly the same as ours (or a bit higher, depending on renting/mortgage as a proportion of income) and have more overcrowding than we do, despite those 8 million extra properties.
This is complicated stuff. I'd guess that they lots more second homes than we do, and that the demand in their cities relative to their towns/rural areas is even worse than our imbalance?
That's a very interesting counterpoint, thanks.
People used to say that the more roads you built, the more roads you needed to build. Might it be the same for houses, if you have policies that do not deter it? Your second homes example might be pertinent.
Part of the reason house prices are high in Britain is because there is a culture of borrowing as much money as possible to buy the best house in the best location, as being the best choice for your future happiness and financial security.
I do think there is an absolute shortage of housing supply in Britain, but distribution, and financing are also big factors. You need to make sure that the right people buy the new houses, and that they don't spend all their money doing so.
As well as the policies to dissuade landlords that Max mentions, I think you also want to reduce the income multiples that the banks lend on. As well as building lots of housing.
If you build enough that the market clears, prices go down. The only reason that prices are "whatever people can afford plus a pound" is because there is a shortage.
Not all houses are the same. So if prices drop overall, a lot of people are still going to max out their house-buying budget in order to buy a larger house in a better location. Now, sure, if people derive extra utility from a better house in a better location then that's a good thing, but if you are hoping that one of the benefits of building lots of houses to reduce house prices is that it will lower people's spending on houses, so that more money will go to more productive parts of the economy, then you might be disappointed, unless you also restrict credit.
As for the "culture war", I think we will reach a middle ground now, in the US and the UK.
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?
Is that a middle ground Horse? I feel like I'm strongly gender critical (albeit I think the strongly gender critical view is the view of the majority) but I'd be broadly happy with that. I'd still be grumpy with thosewho claim to have invented a new gender, mind, but we need to draw a distinction between things we are grumpy about and things we want the state to ban.
Well you tell me?
Personally I think I've moved on this issue somewhat. I really am not sure that people should be making body-changing decisions until they are eighteen. But that's not really trans specific, I feel the same about plastic surgery and so on.
Professional sports are not something that impacts my life at all but I can see the problems people have with it. I still think it's quite a niche issue in the general sense of how many trans athletes there actually are. But I do think a firm policy is needed.
On inventing a new gender, I think people say lots of things. Personally I think this is niche of niche. People want to identify as men or women, in like 99.9% of cases. Let people call themselves whatever they want but I think the law already allows for that.
I think Trump's election will put this all to bed for most people and we can move on. In the same way despite what some people here say, I think SKS has put it to bed too but others can correct me if I am wrong.
I'll try to find out what Trump's policies are, but it won't be today. Am busy.
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. 👍🏻
Holy lumping F***, what a bunch of dumb losers, surprised if any of them could tie a shoelace, especially dumbo Holly
We could send you to be UK Ambassador Malc.
Why does it have to be an Oxbridge type with Whitehall background, why not a Scot? Trump has Scottish roots and runs a hotel in Scotland, he would love to have you there, seated next to him at all the dinners, to cut through all the crap and tell it like it is.
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!
I am going to write a thread about "agency" at some point, and how some people seem to forget that they are not the only people with the ability to make decisions.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
Actions do not take place in a vacuum.
Right now Trump thinks he is king of the world. He should enjoy it because once his ideas make contact with reality it's not going to go well.
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!
I am going to write a thread about "agency" at some point, and how some people seem to forget that they are not the only people with the ability to make decisions.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
Actions do not take place in a vacuum.
Right now Trump thinks he is king of the world. He should enjoy it because once his ideas make contact with reality it's not going to go well.
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!
I am going to write a thread about "agency" at some point, and how some people seem to forget that they are not the only people with the ability to make decisions.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
Actions do not take place in a vacuum.
Right now Trump thinks he is king of the world. He should enjoy it because once his ideas make contact with reality it's not going to go well.
For him. or the world ?
Both.
He's an old man in poor health. He may have escaped prison, but being President has an inescapable core of work.
It's too late now (probably) but we could have borrowed from the Gastarbeiter experience of the two Germanies in the 1970s.
Interesting to read the contrasting ways the two German states at that time treated their imported foreign workers - the DDR was much stricter basically keeping workers from other countries in dormitories and allowing them virtually no contact with the indigenous population.
The FRG was more open and used a repatriation grant to encourage guest workers to return. Each returning worker was offered 10,500 DM, 1,500 DM for a spouse and 1,500 DM for each child if they returned to their country of origin.
Financial incentives for repatriation have been tried before but obviously if your life was at risk in your own country I suspect no amount of money would encourage you to return and nowadays you'd expect anyone who returned to a country like Eritrea with a repatriation grant would lose that money within a few minutes of getting home.
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
We turn out an increasing number of useless dumbos every year, the wheels are coming off the bus.
I'm looking for ways to stop them ending up here. Any suggestions?
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. 👍🏻
Holy lumping F***, what a bunch of dumb losers, surprised if any of them could tie a shoelace, especially dumbo Holly
We could send you to be UK Ambassador Malc.
Why does it have to be an Oxbridge type with Whitehall background, why not a Scot? Trump has Scottish roots and runs a hotel in Scotland, he would love to have you there, seated next to him at all the dinners, to cut through all the crap and tell it like it is.
I could sort him out big time, be no crawling or pussyfooting about , he would get his horoscope read. PS: His hotel is just down the road , I could meet him there for sure.
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 may be hallucinating but I think I heard that Jonathan Powell (ex of Chagos, Blair coterie, Iraq dossier and other highlights) has been appointed. wcpgw?
Ok, I was hallucinating. He's been made the new National Security Adviser in No.10
One thought about comparing ye olden days with today wrt personal finances.
My paternal granddad was middle-class. By the end of the 1940s they had four children between mid-teens and toddling; he worked in a steady job for the council, whilst his wife was a housewife. They had a car, a 'holiday' home a few miles outside of the city, and a main home with mortgage.
With just one 'ordinary' salary, they managed to feed and clothe themselves and the kids, pay the mortgage and fuel for the car, and save. Granddad cycled into work every day. They had pets and some animals like hens in their small garden.
They were relatively lucky. But what else did they need to spend money on?
Now, as well as a mortgage, we seem to spend much more on clothes and fashion. we chuck away loads of old clothes, rather than make do and mend. We 'need' not just TV, but loads of 'packages' from Sky, Netflix, Amazon etc. We pay for broadband Internet, mobile phones, tablets, gadgets, load of plastic trash toys for kids, coffees from the local coffee shop, etc, etc.
We just have so much we both need, and are persuaded, to spend money on nowadays; things that there were no real alternatives for 50, 60 or 70 years ago. I wouldn't want to do without many of those things, but I'm unsure many of them are totally necessary, or make us much happier.
I'd be interested to know if some of our (ahem) older contributors agreed with this impression, as I obviously was not around!
Essentially it says we don't know how to choose immigrants, so we'll admit some randomly. Be interesting to know how the lottery winners compare to immigrants admitted under other programs.
One thought about comparing ye olden days with today wrt personal finances.
My paternal granddad was middle-class. By the end of the 1940s they had four children between mid-teens and toddling; he worked in a steady job for the council, whilst his wife was a housewife. They had a car, a 'holiday' home a few miles outside of the city, and a main home with mortgage.
With just one 'ordinary' salary, they managed to feed and clothe themselves and the kids, pay the mortgage and fuel for the car, and save. Granddad cycled into work every day. They had pets and some animals like hens in their small garden.
They were relatively lucky. But what else did they need to spend money on?
Now, as well as a mortgage, we seem to spend much more on clothes and fashion. we chuck away loads of old clothes, rather than make do and mend. We 'need' not just TV, but loads of 'packages' from Sky, Netflix, Amazon etc. We pay for broadband Internet, mobile phones, tablets, gadgets, load of plastic trash toys for kids, coffees from the local coffee shop, etc, etc.
We just have so much we both need, and are persuaded, to spend money on nowadays; things that there were no real alternatives for 50, 60 or 70 years ago. I wouldn't want to do without many of those things, but I'm unsure many of them are totally necessary, or make us much happier.
I'd be interested to know if some of our (ahem) older contributors agreed with this impression, as I obviously was not around!
yes , more of everything and an unhappy bunch. We lived outdoors , used our imaginations and were happy , few mental health issues in those days.
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.)
Oh this is going to be a fun discussion.
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
So sort of slaves ?
My wife's family are Sri Lankan, so I've read enough about how people from that part of the world are treated in the Gulf to know I will never spend a second longer in any of those countries than I need to to change planes.
I remember watching a (I think) 'Storyville' doc that was shown on BBC4 a few years ago. About African women who travelled to Dubai to work as maids, nannies etc. The number of them who (Russia-like) just "fell out of windows" or whatever was truly heartbreaking. Just to send a few desperately needed dollars back home to the family.
I also knew a nurse at an un-named private hospital which was largely paid for with money from the gulf. She said some of the dudes would spit on the floor in front of the black nurses as they walked past so they had to step over the phlegm.
One thought about comparing ye olden days with today wrt personal finances.
My paternal granddad was middle-class. By the end of the 1940s they had four children between mid-teens and toddling; he worked in a steady job for the council, whilst his wife was a housewife. They had a car, a 'holiday' home a few miles outside of the city, and a main home with mortgage.
With just one 'ordinary' salary, they managed to feed and clothe themselves and the kids, pay the mortgage and fuel for the car, and save. Granddad cycled into work every day. They had pets and some animals like hens in their small garden.
They were relatively lucky. But what else did they need to spend money on?
Now, as well as a mortgage, we seem to spend much more on clothes and fashion. we chuck away loads of old clothes, rather than make do and mend. We 'need' not just TV, but loads of 'packages' from Sky, Netflix, Amazon etc. We pay for broadband Internet, mobile phones, tablets, gadgets, load of plastic trash toys for kids, coffees from the local coffee shop, etc, etc.
We just have so much we both need, and are persuaded, to spend money on nowadays; things that there were no real alternatives for 50, 60 or 70 years ago. I wouldn't want to do without many of those things, but I'm unsure many of them are totally necessary, or make us much happier.
I'd be interested to know if some of our (ahem) older contributors agreed with this impression, as I obviously was not around!
yes , more of everything and an unhappy bunch. We lived outdoors , used our imaginations and were happy , few mental health issues in those days.
I was just sorting out the inherited family photos. Images of family holidays at the seaside - my parents, and later me, in an old railway carriage, admittedly with some leanto extensions added along the line in timber and tarpaper and ex-prefab metal-framed windows, by the seaside. Not even a tap in the earlier days - a 100 yard walk to the nearest standpipe. Luxury when the water was piped in ...
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.
Some insightful comments from you this evening, my friend, and it's certainly got me thinking.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
Yes, I could witter on, but I think you have it right here. Just as your mum wanted to go back to an era when we had park keepers, so to does western society want to go back to an era where it could shuffle papers on a desk (services industry) and buy as much tat as it likes (manufacturing industry).
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
There is a recent thread on mumsnet where a mother is worried that the maths work her child has been asked to do (at an English school) is too difficult. These sorts of reminders of the anti-education culture in Britain are quite common.
As someone bullied for being too smart at a south London comprehensive that was seen as aspirational enough to receive visits from New Labour ministers, this is something I am not liable to forget.
The VAT charge on private school fees doesn't exactly send the message that education is something to be encouraged.
It would be helpful in these discussions of immigration, by the way, if commenters would be clear on what they are trying to maximize (or minimize). GDP? Mean family income? Crime? National power? Justice?
Under the last, you might prioritize the admission of people from groups like the pygmies and the Khoisan.
Comments
https://youtube.com/shorts/U_i6PyNf_AQ?si=rmG7T4YuXNwDUyWY
The important thing to note is that immigrants to Dubai have no recourse to public funds, no path to citizenship, will be deported if they lose they job, and deported if they appear in front of a court found guilty of anything more serious than dropping litter. They will be taken from the court to the airport, and can appeal at their own expense from abroad.
My mother always said the end began when the Council got rid of the park keepers as this began the era of knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing into which we fell some time in the early 70s after oil quadrupled in price (and the OPEC nations didn't lose a customer).
We were led down a cul-de-sac of monetarist trickledown nonsense in the 80s and beyond. The reason we didn't and don't build the infrastructure we need is simple - we were told it was better we kept more of the money we earned ourselves than give it to the Government who would waste it. That might be true but it doesn't build a single road, railway, prison or hospital while people still complained about the amount of tax they paid.
It's not we can't afford to improve the nation's infrastructure - we choose not to because we'd rather keep our hard earned to spend on "imported tat" which is often goods we no longer produce here such as shirts or items of intimate apparel or coal.
Yet if we wanted to rebuild the old industries (and even assuming we could), we could possibly maintain a domestic market but our products would be so expensive in the global market (even with a devalued currency) we couldn't sell them - coals to Newcastle or trousers to Bangladesh.
I know what you mean about "the answers" - we can't bring back the park keepers even if we wanted to. The current demographic pyramid is becoming less supportive of an economic model built on a previous pyramid.
How can we change the model? It's changed before, mainly as a result of technological innovation but not as the proponents of change imagined. I remember reading computers would render most work obsolete by 2000 and we'd all have rewarding lives of recreation and study - yeah, right.
AI, as it evolves, will have an impact but I'm not sure what that will be. I've commented before we are moving beyond the post-industrial world into a post-work world where the notion of work as defined from the Industrial Revolution onward is going to change. It's no coincidence one of the first things the new factories instigated was universal education - the answers begin, I think, with improving the skillsets of all which might in turn break the productivity logjam on the basis working smarter is better than working harder.
She's included loads of statistical analysis of the different types of decisions that VAR deals with, and sounded plausible
She believes that AI should assist VAR decisions to make them quicker
How do footy fans feel about that?
On football, Wolves v Saints tomorrow is a huge game
And that’s not likely to be us.
Remarkable numbers of US/UK born children to illegal migrants too, which complicates matters.
We - the UK - currently have agency. Forcing the UK away from the EU means taking away our agency. And neither countries nor people like having their agency removed.
This is equally important regarding tariffs and trade generally. China - for example - has agency too. If the US imposes punitive sanctions on China, it will respond in kind. It may also look to responses like punishing American companies seen as close to the US administration (watch out Tesla).
Actions do not take place in a vacuum.
It's a simplification of complicated factors, but what it really boils down to is the west thought free trade would make it richer, which it did for a time. Until it started making us poorer relative to developing economies. And, as you rightly say, there's no way back (See RCS1000's point also about resources).
People are looking for revanchist solutions, whether that's a return to the smoot-hawley tariff era, or harking back to an era where there weren't so many trans about, as they have wrongly associated liberal society with liberal economics, and therefore seek to roll back both.
I am stumped for answers, but I do think you are right about education. Productivity in a knowledge economy comes from having smarter, more capable people. The UK chronically under-invests in education. Rather than increase spending to the NHS, I'd support a government that threw that extra £20bn at schools. Education in the UK is appalling. Treated more as a daycare cost so parents can go out and work, than an investment in creating a smarter and more productive generation a few years down the line.
At a minimum, it would require a much larger enforcement operation and some form of national identity to prove either citizenship or right to remain (which would be automatically updated if there was no evidence of formal employment?)
I'd still be grumpy with thosewho claim to have invented a new gender, mind, but we need to draw a distinction between things we are grumpy about and things we want the state to ban.
As it is, the large employers get a supply of cheap labour, and the GOP gets a political football. What’s not to like?
That would be helpful. But I will bet you that Trump's policies to the get the US economy moving will do exactly the opposite.
I don't know why I feel more at ease, perhaps because he's got a legitimate mandate to probably fuck it up. And probably because it will force the Democrats to change, as Labour did.
I think the culture wars are over though.
The other bits are policy choices, depending on whether you want integration, and what your TFR is.
See: Singapore.
Personally I think I've moved on this issue somewhat. I really am not sure that people should be making body-changing decisions until they are eighteen. But that's not really trans specific, I feel the same about plastic surgery and so on.
Professional sports are not something that impacts my life at all but I can see the problems people have with it. I still think it's quite a niche issue in the general sense of how many trans athletes there actually are. But I do think a firm policy is needed.
On inventing a new gender, I think people say lots of things. Personally I think this is niche of niche. People want to identify as men or women, in like 99.9% of cases. Let people call themselves whatever they want but I think the law already allows for that.
I think Trump's election will put this all to bed for most people and we can move on. In the same way despite what some people here say, I think SKS has put it to bed too but others can correct me if I am wrong.
It doesn’t work in an environment where it’s de facto impossible to deport someone, because they have a girlfriend or a cat, and can have taxpayer-funded lawyers arguing their case almost indefinitely.
What sort of badass leader, who the Donald respects, needs the Donald so badly?
I have a distant hope that this might be the sort of insane thing that changes his mind on Ukraine
I sincerely believe that nobody beyond a tiny few actually do not want trans people to exist. I sincerely hope we can just continue on in that spirit if we can find proper consensus on this issue.
Of course all of this will be irrelevant if the economy is in a mess anyway. I don't think the Democrats lost for being too "w word" but I have no doubt their obsession with it didn't help. I think they will move on now.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/08/europe/ukraine-trump-elon-musk-zelensky-intl-latam/index.html
Only problem with this is that it's western countries where 99.9% of migrants want to move to, not China, India, South American countries, Russia, Indonesia, etc.
In the US, on the other hand, the 14th Amendment gives anyone born on US soil the right to US citizenship.
The issue is whether - for it to be a successful policy - that low skilled immigrants should not be allowed to integrate at all. Or indeed, earn a path to citizenship. And I think that's much more of a policy choice. Again, see Singapore.
* Maybe not traffic offences, but you get the point.
We could throw a hundred billion at education right now. And in fifteen to twenty years time we would have a super educated, high-productivity workforce able to adapt and change using a variety of transferable skills. And so on.
But it would take another ten to twenty years on top of those twenty years for the real benefits to be felt, as that generation replaced the management and entrepreneurs and so on of the previous generation.
So really there would be no noticeable benefit to chucking 100bn at education for 20 years, and you'd be lucky if you felt the full force of its impact before 40 years.
We have 5 year election cycles, and most politicians in their 40s will be dead or retired by the time we feel the actual effects of a massive increase in education spending.
So nobody does it.
To give an example: You can commission and open a new hospital in the lifetime of a Parliament, and you will see immediate effects. The full effects of improving education spending won't really be felt until twenty years down the line, even if there's a marginal improvement in the interim.
The nature of democracy means we prioritise short term investments that deliver results within the 5 year election cycle over long term investments that would result in greater productivity increases a generation down the line.
Again, dunno what the answer is to that.
Awfully similar to the UK temporary farm workers scheme, by the way.
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!
Why does it have to be an Oxbridge type with Whitehall background, why not a Scot? Trump has Scottish roots and runs a hotel in Scotland, he would love to have you there, seated next to him at all the dinners, to cut through all the crap and tell it like it is.
https://news.sky.com/story/met-refers-two-cases-to-police-watchdog-over-handling-of-mohamed-al-fayed-investigations-13250778
He's an old man in poor health. He may have escaped prison, but being President has an inescapable core of work.
Interesting to read the contrasting ways the two German states at that time treated their imported foreign workers - the DDR was much stricter basically keeping workers from other countries in dormitories and allowing them virtually no contact with the indigenous population.
The FRG was more open and used a repatriation grant to encourage guest workers to return. Each returning worker was offered 10,500 DM, 1,500 DM for a spouse and 1,500 DM for each child if they returned to their country of origin.
Financial incentives for repatriation have been tried before but obviously if your life was at risk in your own country I suspect no amount of money would encourage you to return and nowadays you'd expect anyone who returned to a country like Eritrea with a repatriation grant would lose that money within a few minutes of getting home.
PS: His hotel is just down the road , I could meet him there for sure.
My paternal granddad was middle-class. By the end of the 1940s they had four children between mid-teens and toddling; he worked in a steady job for the council, whilst his wife was a housewife. They had a car, a 'holiday' home a few miles outside of the city, and a main home with mortgage.
With just one 'ordinary' salary, they managed to feed and clothe themselves and the kids, pay the mortgage and fuel for the car, and save. Granddad cycled into work every day. They had pets and some animals like hens in their small garden.
They were relatively lucky. But what else did they need to spend money on?
Now, as well as a mortgage, we seem to spend much more on clothes and fashion. we chuck away loads of old clothes, rather than make do and mend. We 'need' not just TV, but loads of 'packages' from Sky, Netflix, Amazon etc. We pay for broadband Internet, mobile phones, tablets, gadgets, load of plastic trash toys for kids, coffees from the local coffee shop, etc, etc.
We just have so much we both need, and are persuaded, to spend money on nowadays; things that there were no real alternatives for 50, 60 or 70 years ago. I wouldn't want to do without many of those things, but I'm unsure many of them are totally necessary, or make us much happier.
I'd be interested to know if some of our (ahem) older contributors agreed with this impression, as I obviously was not around!
Eric Hobsbawm would write a new book on this new stage in our development, technological oligarchy.
Reform UK - 21%
Labour - 33%
Green - 5%
Liberal Democrats - 9%
Conservative - 18%
Plaid Cymru - 13%
(Table V2)
Essentially it says we don't know how to choose immigrants, so we'll admit some randomly. Be interesting to know how the lottery winners compare to immigrants admitted under other programs.
That's because it also covers the acceleration of cultural conflicts and social media polarisation, as well as other digital acceleration.
Quite dizzying changes , these times represent.
I also knew a nurse at an un-named private hospital which was largely paid for with money from the gulf. She said some of the dudes would spit on the floor in front of the black nurses as they walked past so they had to step over the phlegm.
As someone bullied for being too smart at a south London comprehensive that was seen as aspirational enough to receive visits from New Labour ministers, this is something I am not liable to forget.
The VAT charge on private school fees doesn't exactly send the message that education is something to be encouraged.
Under the last, you might prioritize the admission of people from groups like the pygmies and the Khoisan.
(Here are some numbers on refugees: https://www.worlddata.info/refugees-by-country.php )