My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
25% of salary for rent is pretty good these days. Mind you, you don't say how much tax you paid.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I have daily financial records back to October 1962 when I opened my bank account with Lloyds which I still have. My records start in £sd. My net salary was £17 a week.
I had a friend whose family was famous for never throwing anything away. He had handwritten bank statements from the 1700s in his attic…
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
In 1997, I paid 125 quid a week for a small room in a house share in East London, not far from Brick Lane. There were five of us sharing the house and only one working shower. Fortunately, I was the first to work in the morning, and therefore usually didn't have to wait.
I hope you left plenty of hot water for them!
We had one of those funny gas heaters on demand. It worked reasonably well, amazingly enough.
I have a gas heater that come on on demand. No hot water cistern. Constant hot water at mains pressure.
So about all that having fixed the foundations while going further and faster to smash the gangs and being laser focused on growth in order to be fighting ready by 2035....
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
It must be. Ed Davey supports it.
The Starmer thoughts mentioned by Carnforth above are of course nonsense as he knows. The single market is something you are a member of or not. If you are in it, all the same rules apply to you as everyone else. If you are not, everything has to be negotiated. Inside it, sending widgets from Gateshead to Riga is the same as sending it from Gateshead to Birmingham. (Though a little further). Outside the SM, it isn't. In the SM, you can go and live in Prague because you feel like working there. Outside you can't. These are not alignable situations.
Do we need Michel Barnier to get that staircase diagram out again?
There may be some more improvements on the step the UK chose to place itself on, but the fundamental access/autonomy tradeoff remains.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
It must be. Ed Davey supports it.
The Starmer thoughts mentioned by Carnforth above are of course nonsense as he knows. The single market is something you are a member of or not. If you are in it, all the same rules apply to you as everyone else. If you are not, everything has to be negotiated. Inside it, sending widgets from Gateshead to Riga is the same as sending it from Gateshead to Birmingham. (Though a little further). Outside the SM, it isn't. In the SM, you can go and live in Prague because you feel like working there. Outside you can't. These are not alignable situations.
Sending widgets is more to do with Customs Union than Single Market, but yes the EU institutions are very specific arrangements that don’t work well for non-members of the EU itself.
Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid
Protest over climate crisis and AI has cut power to tens of thousands of homes which may take days to fully restore
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
How to make friends and influence people, cut of their power to a f##k load of people in the middle of sodding winter. That's not compaigning that is terrorism.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
And yet, on average, housing costs are the lowest they have been since the 80s. The cost of housing is a significant issue for only a minority of households.
Not true at all.
Housing costs considerably more than it did.
Housing costs are only relevant to those who are actually paying housing costs, if you're not paying housing costs then you don't affect the mean, median or modal average for housing costs.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
Are people in Japan more optimistic and happy because their country chose not go the immigration route?
I don't know the answer to that, for what it's worth. And it's really only Japan which has avoided significant net migration in the last half century. And it may be that their issues are nothing to do with demographics.
It is worth asking the question: which developed countries have been successes over the last 30 years? And what do they have in common? Are the ones that have significantly restricted immigration done better (economically, etc.) or worse?
It's difficult to control for everything, but the fact that Finland has the highest cumulative GDP-per capita growth in the region and the lowest level of immigration stands out.
This is an odd use of the word "highest" that I haven't encountered before...
*In the region*
Finland - 101.9 Denmark - 98.1 Norway - 76.5 Sweden - 75.3
Demark has a 50% larger share of the population being foreign born than Finland, for a negligible difference in GDP per capita growth rate over the period.
At the very least, that doesn't suggest a strong correlation.
Also, Denmark has grown really quickly in the last five years, so if you extend the numbers, you will almost certainly see it having passed Finland. In fact, Finland's had a pretty miserable time of late:
2020: -2.49% (COVID contraction) 2021: 2.73% (modest recovery) 2022: 1.45% (slowing) 2023: -0.9% (contraction) 2024: 0.4% (minimal growth) 2025: Near stagnation (0.1% projected), with contractions in Q2 (-0.4%) and Q3 (-0.3%)
You need to be careful with figures for foreign born people in small European countries because it can just mean people moving between Malmo and Copenhagen, which is not really immigration.
I'm just pointing out that if you choose to extend the GDP growth period to 2025, you will almost certainly see Denmark having outperformed Finland.
For what it's worth, the reason the UK's GDP per capita in USD did so poorly in the period is that the pound collapsed against the dollar in 2016. For some reason.
i think the pound collapsed against more currencies than just the dollar
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
That's not true - my house was previously owned by a Teaching Assistant, one of the lowest paid jobs there is (salary is term time only). She bought in the era of 0.5% mortgages though.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
Don’t. My
I got 1.69% fixed for five years in February 2022, which officially started in April of that year. 16 months left to go.
I'm cursing that I didn't fix for seven years even though it was very slightly more expensive.
Same regrets here (2021 and five year fix). My rational brain knew it couldn’t get much better so why didn’t I go longer?
We didn’t really need too much hindsight, to know that we should all have fixed at rates below 2% for the lifetime of the loan.
Yet most of us took a much shorter fixed term for a slightly better rate at the time. An interesting study in behaviour.
Although the maths for me is 0.3% saving over 7 years. =2.1% saving on a larger principal sp equivalent to 3.5% on the reduced principal at the end of the term.
If rates are 2.7% or lower in mid 2027 then my call will have paid off…
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
It must be. Ed Davey supports it.
The Starmer thoughts mentioned by Carnforth above are of course nonsense as he knows. The single market is something you are a member of or not. If you are in it, all the same rules apply to you as everyone else. If you are not, everything has to be negotiated. Inside it, sending widgets from Gateshead to Riga is the same as sending it from Gateshead to Birmingham. (Though a little further). Outside the SM, it isn't. In the SM, you can go and live in Prague because you feel like working there. Outside you can't. These are not alignable situations.
Sending widgets is more to do with Customs Union than Single Market, but yes the EU institutions are very specific arrangements that don’t work well for non-members of the EU itself.
Yes we need to rejoin. Slowly step by step. A lot of trust was destroyed. Probably a generation needs to pass with all the old players gone. I have it as a target for my 100th birthday in 2043. Only 17 years to go. I'm looking forward to it.
Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid
Protest over climate crisis and AI has cut power to tens of thousands of homes which may take days to fully restore
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
How to make friends and influence people, cut of their power to a f##k load of people in the middle of sodding winter. That's not compaigning that is terrorism.
Some left-wing judge probably gives them a suspended sentence, as with the UK the bar to actually getting locked up for this sort of ‘protest’ is considerably higher then most of the public think it should be.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
Could have been me. I was in marketing. Foote Cone and Belding. Really good times!! Also Alan Parker and CDP.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
And yet, on average, housing costs are the lowest they have been since the 80s. The cost of housing is a significant issue for only a minority of households.
The trouble with housing costs is that the average doesn't tell us much.
My goto example is the street where I live. Some of my neighbours are retired school secretaries who bought many decades ago and now have housing costs of zero. Some are people like me who moved here in the late 2000s and have housing costs of not-very-much. The kind of people who move here now are paying a fortune for similar boxes of bricks.
I can understand why long-standing Romford residents get pissed off about this, even before you start to consider the social changes that follow. But it's inevitable, given our veneration of the London Green Belt.
What’s housebuilding like round there .
By me we have had, and still have, a few developments throwing up houses.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
That's not true - my house was previously owned by a Teaching Assistant, one of the lowest paid jobs there is (salary is term time only). She bought in the era of 0.5% mortgages though.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
Don’t. My
I got 1.69% fixed for five years in February 2022, which officially started in April of that year. 16 months left to go.
I'm cursing that I didn't fix for seven years even though it was very slightly more expensive.
Same regrets here (2021 and five year fix). My rational brain knew it couldn’t get much better so why didn’t I go longer?
Just seen Fulhams equaliser v Liverpool. No wonder Liverpool are where they are. They allow a guy wide out to approach tge goal and let fly from 25 yards with not a Liverpool.player within 10 yards. Great shot nevertheless.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
It must be. Ed Davey supports it.
The Starmer thoughts mentioned by Carnforth above are of course nonsense as he knows. The single market is something you are a member of or not. If you are in it, all the same rules apply to you as everyone else. If you are not, everything has to be negotiated. Inside it, sending widgets from Gateshead to Riga is the same as sending it from Gateshead to Birmingham. (Though a little further). Outside the SM, it isn't. In the SM, you can go and live in Prague because you feel like working there. Outside you can't. These are not alignable situations.
Sending widgets is more to do with Customs Union than Single Market, but yes the EU institutions are very specific arrangements that don’t work well for non-members of the EU itself.
It's both. The CU means the concept of widget is tariff free and paperwork free; the SM means there is a regulatory structure telling you the limits of what constitutes a valid and lawful widget. The same applies to My Little Pony Stickers.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
Estimates that are a case of garbage in, garbage out, based on assumptions.
The UK post-Brexit and over the long-term has grown faster than the Eurozone or comparison nations like Germany, not slower. So where is this 0.5% magically coming from?
Just seen Fulhams equaliser v Liverpool. No wonder Liverpool are where they are. They allow a guy wide out to approach tge goal and let fly from 25 yards with not a Liverpool.player within 10 yards. Great shot nevertheless.
Even as a Liverpool fan watching the match, I have to concede that was poor defending and a well executed shot. Goal of the month candidate.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
Starmer moaning is risible That's just what the ECHR is .. which he made his living out of. The man is despicable.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
What was immigration trying to fix? Was it less output? Output per worker not increasing as much as the number of workers exiting?
Was it investment in trying to reduce the output gap by using the large amounts of cheap credit available e.g. Quantitive Easing.
Was it the lack of business friendly policies emerging from the dominant party of government in the last 50 years. If it was the latter, then perhaps that party should STFU about how others are trying to remedy their legacy.
Well, there are different types of immigration.
Some is people who met a partner overseas and married them, and want them to live in the UK with them. Not an unreasonable ask, one would think.
Some is people on inter-coroporate transfers: we're setting up a London, you're in charge. Some of this is temporary, some permanent. Often it is expected to be one type, and ends up another.
Some is people who come here via visas for specific job types where there is considered to be a shortage, or because they command a certain salary.
One of the things the UK does poorly, I think, is not having the sharp distinction between immigrant and non-immigrant visas. I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa, and have no path to a Green Card or citizenship. I can apply for an immigrant visa (with Green Card), but that is an entirely separate process.
On your first point, I may have mentioned this one a few times before the UK system doesn’t understand the case of someone who moves away and just happens to get married, it’s set up mostly for what might be called arranged marriages involving a foreign spouse.
In the UK system pretty much any visa, even a visit visa, is an immigrant visa, because in practice it’s almost impossible to deport anyone. Where I live is pretty much the opposite, it’s almost impossible to get an immigrant visa without exceptional skill, only dozens issued per year, although long-term visas are now available for high earners. The US system sits somewhere in the middle although the O-1 visa is something of an anomoly, where you have to meet a high bar for skill and salary yet it’s not an automatic immigrant visa.
I think that's right.
And while the US system is (at times) unnecessarily complex, having non-immigrant limited term visas does give you a bit of an automatic stabalizer, because you have large numbers of people coming to the end of their term. Which I think allows the government a lot more control.
I think my preferred route would be to introduce non-immigrant visas with limited terms, but allow people who have passed certain tests (employment, tax paying, civic service, no criminal record) to move onto immigrant visas.
That would -I think- be the best of both worlds.
And for what it's worth, the O-1 (which I'm on) does have an immigrant cousin, the EB1A. If you qualify for the O-1, you usually can qualify for the EB1A, but it's a time consuming and expensive process to shift between the two.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
All of this discussion forgets the role of the EU itself, and of its member states.
1) It’s now impossible to negotiate much more than has already been agreed this side of the UK election, noting impending votes within the EU, and the EU can read the opinion polls too.
2) Russia’s little helpers within the EU would use anything they had veto rights over to play games on Ukraine.
We will oscillate in and out of various things depending on who is in power, but the U.K. position is now pretty fixed. No Customs Union, but alignment on agriculture and goods related stuff we’d do anyway because they are the biggest market for org businesses. None of the rest.
However, in a world without US presence in Europe, we are going to matter to each other as allies, so there’s a bit of wiggle room to find the best, mutually beneficial version of all that.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
Starmer will do whatever he thinks is politically expedient in week.
Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile in joint statement Sunday say they «reject the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, infringing the fundamental principles of international law» and reiterate «concerns about any attempt at the external administration or appropriation of natural or strategic resources» in a clear reference to energy resources.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
Then why has Switzerland, which has agreements with the EU which almost amount to single market membership, always refused to join the customs union?
The Labour leader tells Laura Kuenssberg he will still be prime minister next year as it is not in the national interest to chop and change like the Tories did
Starmer told Laura Kuenssberg on her BBC show on Sunday: “Under the last government we saw constant chopping and changing of leadership, of teams — it caused utter chaos, utter chaos, and it’s amongst the reasons that the Tories were booted out so effectively at the last election.
Quote from The Times… if it’s not in the national interest to chop and change Prime Ministers, and doing so causes utter chaos, why did he keep demanding the Tory PM’s resign?
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
Two very close calls for the VAR, and yes from the line on the pitch it looked like it would go the other way.
I think they should really have a margin in these decisions, such as ‘umpire’s call’ in cricket, where there needs to be an egregious error to overturn the decision of the officials on the ground.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
Then why has Switzerland, which has agreements with the EU which almost amount to single market membership, always refused to join the customs union?
This isn't about logic. It's about stimulating the right erogenous zones with the Labour base.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
Are people in Japan more optimistic and happy because their country chose not go the immigration route?
I don't know the answer to that, for what it's worth. And it's really only Japan which has avoided significant net migration in the last half century. And it may be that their issues are nothing to do with demographics.
It is worth asking the question: which developed countries have been successes over the last 30 years? And what do they have in common? Are the ones that have significantly restricted immigration done better (economically, etc.) or worse?
The countries with the highest GDP growth since 1980 tend to be the ex-Communist states. If we stick to 1st world countries, depending on what you include, you have.
Israel 3.4% p.a. Cyprus 3% Ireland 2.3% Australia 2.3% New Zealand 2.2% Luxembourg 2.1%
Most of those have seen high immigration, except for NZ, which has high net emigration, doesn't it? But, of course, GDP growth isn't the only metric that matters.
NZ has generally had quite high net immigration in the last 30 years I think. Even now, net immigration is -just - a positive number.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
Are people in Japan more optimistic and happy because their country chose not go the immigration route?
I don't know the answer to that, for what it's worth. And it's really only Japan which has avoided significant net migration in the last half century. And it may be that their issues are nothing to do with demographics.
It is worth asking the question: which developed countries have been successes over the last 30 years? And what do they have in common? Are the ones that have significantly restricted immigration done better (economically, etc.) or worse?
The countries with the highest GDP growth since 1980 tend to be the ex-Communist states. If we stick to 1st world countries, depending on what you include, you have.
Israel 3.4% p.a. Cyprus 3% Ireland 2.3% Australia 2.3% New Zealand 2.2% Luxembourg 2.1%
Most of those have seen high immigration, except for NZ, which has high net emigration, doesn't it? But, of course, GDP growth isn't the only metric that matters.
Australia does have tightly controlled immigration though, focused strictly on those with the trade skills and qualifications it needs
Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile in joint statement Sunday say they «reject the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, infringing the fundamental principles of international law» and reiterate «concerns about any attempt at the external administration or appropriation of natural or strategic resources» in a clear reference to energy resources.
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
Customs Union is only silly relative to full membership. Estimates are that in its own it increases GDP by 0.5%, which is nothing remarkable but still more than the combined post Brexit trade deals. And the EU does trade deals as well that the UK would probably be part of in a customs union.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
Then why has Switzerland, which has agreements with the EU which almost amount to single market membership, always refused to join the customs union?
Mainly to protect their farmers with sky high tariffs. UK governments have never cared about their farmers in the same way. Customs Union isn't some magical solution but the fact another country isn't a member of it for reasons that don't apply to us doesn't indicate they know something we don't or a reason in itself for us not to be a member. In any case Switzerland has specific single market arrangements with the EU including freedom of movement that Starmer has rejected. We will do whatever we do for our own reasons.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Dominic Cummings in an annoying idiot in so many ways, but there is one area concerning top quality leadership in which, while not exemplifying it, he is right. It is found in his chat with the Spectator, link below.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
Are people in Japan more optimistic and happy because their country chose not go the immigration route?
I don't know the answer to that, for what it's worth. And it's really only Japan which has avoided significant net migration in the last half century. And it may be that their issues are nothing to do with demographics.
It is worth asking the question: which developed countries have been successes over the last 30 years? And what do they have in common? Are the ones that have significantly restricted immigration done better (economically, etc.) or worse?
It's difficult to control for everything, but the fact that Finland has the highest cumulative GDP-per capita growth in the region and the lowest level of immigration stands out.
Umm.
Switzerland is highest at 122%, and has the highest proportion of the population being foreign born.
As I said, it's difficult to control for everything, but countries like Ireland and Switzerland have too many unique factors to make them useful reference points. The Nordic countries seem the most comparable.
The one country that stands out is the UK. Brexit perhaps? The countries that joined the EU in that period (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia) have done enormously well, except for Cyprus.
GDP per capita outside of London looks worse still.
Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid
Protest over climate crisis and AI has cut power to tens of thousands of homes which may take days to fully restore
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
How to make friends and influence people, cut of their power to a f##k load of people in the middle of sodding winter. That's not compaigning that is terrorism.
Can't find any reports of it here (as opposed to the air traffic control problem), but was told about it by a Greek cafe owner today who was complaining about not being able to source Greek foodstuffs.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Dominic Cummings in an annoying idiot in so many ways, but there is one area concerning top quality leadership in which, while not exemplifying it, he is right. It is found in his chat with the Spectator, link below.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
I'll offer the thought no one has had a "vision" since Thatcher - there hasn't really been one. We've muddled along in this post-Thatcherite concensus ever since 1990 and you could argue the one person who really challenged it - Truss - was packed off in six weeks so the concensus, for all the moaning on here and elsewhere, broadly works.
Perhaps more accurately, no one has put forward an alternative which fits the changing socio-economic and demographic profile of our country - we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions.
Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile in joint statement Sunday say they «reject the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, infringing the fundamental principles of international law» and reiterate «concerns about any attempt at the external administration or appropriation of natural or strategic resources» in a clear reference to energy resources.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile in joint statement Sunday say they «reject the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, infringing the fundamental principles of international law» and reiterate «concerns about any attempt at the external administration or appropriation of natural or strategic resources» in a clear reference to energy resources.
Reject in what sense? Do they even have a time machine?
They will likely vote to protest against it in any UN General Assembly vote I suspect (Columbia is on the UN Security Council at the moment so could also vote against it there), which Trump of course will be terrified by
"Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK should move towards closer alignment with EU markets "if it's in our national interest". The prime minister told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg it would be "better looking to the single market rather than the customs union for our further alignment", in order to protect trade deals with India and the US.
But he ruled out revisiting manifesto promises not to rejoin the EU single market or customs union, or to end freedom of movement."
Starmer understands the customs union stuff is silly.
It must be. Ed Davey supports it.
The same Ed Davey that spent the last 24 hours on the same side as China, Russia, Iran, and Jeremy Corbyn, on the subject of Venezuela.
And France and many others. The UN vote will be interesting.
The UN has long since been relevant wrt to the world order.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
It's such a simple thing that would end a lot of the play acting, crowding round the refs (which causes delays), that it is bizarre it has not been done.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Dominic Cummings in an annoying idiot in so many ways, but there is one area concerning top quality leadership in which, while not exemplifying it, he is right. It is found in his chat with the Spectator, link below.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
I'll offer the thought no one has had a "vision" since Thatcher - there hasn't really been one. We've muddled along in this post-Thatcherite concensus ever since 1990 and you could argue the one person who really challenged it - Truss - was packed off in six weeks so the concensus, for all the moaning on here and elsewhere, broadly works.
Perhaps more accurately, no one has put forward an alternative which fits the changing socio-economic and demographic profile of our country - we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions.
Or, at the very least, the consensus works better than any of the alternatives that anyone has come up with. That it doesn't work as well as we might like (and some of its success has been by kicking problems into a future that's now the present) is our problem.
The 20th century saw all sorts of non-consensus ideas tried and found to fail horribly. The guardrails on capitalism and socialism are there for good reasons.
Going back to the header, the pop hits of (say) the 60s to the 90s were the way they were because that works. Sucks if you want to make new music now, of course. You either try to do things that have been done before, or you find a new niche that's objectively worse. But that's showbiz.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
What was immigration trying to fix? Was it less output? Output per worker not increasing as much as the number of workers exiting?
Was it investment in trying to reduce the output gap by using the large amounts of cheap credit available e.g. Quantitive Easing.
Was it the lack of business friendly policies emerging from the dominant party of government in the last 50 years. If it was the latter, then perhaps that party should STFU about how others are trying to remedy their legacy.
Well, there are different types of immigration.
Some is people who met a partner overseas and married them, and want them to live in the UK with them. Not an unreasonable ask, one would think.
Some is people on inter-coroporate transfers: we're setting up a London, you're in charge. Some of this is temporary, some permanent. Often it is expected to be one type, and ends up another.
Some is people who come here via visas for specific job types where there is considered to be a shortage, or because they command a certain salary.
One of the things the UK does poorly, I think, is not having the sharp distinction between immigrant and non-immigrant visas. I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa, and have no path to a Green Card or citizenship. I can apply for an immigrant visa (with Green Card), but that is an entirely separate process.
On your first point, I may have mentioned this one a few times before the UK system doesn’t understand the case of someone who moves away and just happens to get married, it’s set up mostly for what might be called arranged marriages involving a foreign spouse.
In the UK system pretty much any visa, even a visit visa, is an immigrant visa, because in practice it’s almost impossible to deport anyone. Where I live is pretty much the opposite, it’s almost impossible to get an immigrant visa without exceptional skill, only dozens issued per year, although long-term visas are now available for high earners. The US system sits somewhere in the middle although the O-1 visa is something of an anomoly, where you have to meet a high bar for skill and salary yet it’s not an automatic immigrant visa.
I think that's right.
And while the US system is (at times) unnecessarily complex, having non-immigrant limited term visas does give you a bit of an automatic stabalizer, because you have large numbers of people coming to the end of their term. Which I think allows the government a lot more control.
I think my preferred route would be to introduce non-immigrant visas with limited terms, but allow people who have passed certain tests (employment, tax paying, civic service, no criminal record) to move onto immigrant visas.
That would -I think- be the best of both worlds.
And for what it's worth, the O-1 (which I'm on) does have an immigrant cousin, the EB1A. If you qualify for the O-1, you usually can qualify for the EB1A, but it's a time consuming and expensive process to shift between the two.
Yes it’s the complexity and the number of different visas that make the system difficult to manage. As you say, it should be pretty easy for someone like yourself (high earner, taxpayer, net contributor, of good character) to move from one visa to another if he or she wishes. There was probably historical reasons why O visas and EB visas are different, but in practice anyone who qualifies for an O-1 (just under 20k issued per year) is unlikely to be much trouble if given a green card.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
Let’s play with fifteen men instead of eleven, and let’s replace the spherical ball with an ovoid one.
But yes, joking aside rugby does it well, both in explaining decisions and the conduct of players towards officials.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
Could have been me. I was in marketing. Foote Cone and Belding. Really good times!! Also Alan Parker and CDP.
Yes I think it could well have been FCB. I did quite a bit for them. CDP later but I didn't do any stills for them. Yes they were good times. I came across this recently which was almost certainly CDP and ironically shot by Alan Parker by then cutting his teeth on Directing. Typical CDP!
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
It's such a simple thing that would end a lot of the play acting, crowding round the refs (which causes delays), that it is bizarre it has not been done.
It could be done without any changes in the Laws. All it needs is refs to start applying them. Why won't they? Because none of them are prepared to go out on limb. They know they wouldn't be backed by the FA. So they just carry on doing what everyone else does, which results in the chaotic and unsatisfactory situation which contrasts so obviously with what happens in other sports, such as rugby.
Miking up won't happen. It would give the refs too much authority. The FA don't want that. They want to keep a much control for themselves as possible.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
Let’s play with fifteen men instead of eleven, and let’s replace the spherical ball with an ovoid one.
But yes, joking aside rugby does it well, both in explaining decisions and the conduct of players towards officials.
And lets allow drinking at the matches, and un-segregated crowds while we are at it.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
Let’s play with fifteen men instead of eleven, and let’s replace the spherical ball with an ovoid one.
But yes, joking aside rugby does it well, both in explaining decisions and the conduct of players towards officials.
And lets allow drinking at the matches, and un-segregated crowds while we are at it.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Canada has already gone into negative net migration figures. We need to do the same for a sustained period.
It is worth noting, of course, that countries which have not had significant levels of immigration (like Japan) have not been all sweetness and light.
The problem is that our politicians -of all hues- have lied to us.
If you don't import people of working age, then you get a horribly inverted population pyramid and an increasing share of workers income going on supporting oldies. (Which is bad.)
And if you do import workers, you get social issues and housing shortages. (Which is also bad.)
Torsten Bell posted an interesting thread today about the decline of employment of teenagers and people doing Saturday jobs while studying. That's the exact opposite of what you would expect to see in a country with an inverted population pyramid.
Using immigration as a quick fix has been disastrous whichever way you look at it.
Are people in Japan more optimistic and happy because their country chose not go the immigration route?
I don't know the answer to that, for what it's worth. And it's really only Japan which has avoided significant net migration in the last half century. And it may be that their issues are nothing to do with demographics.
It is worth asking the question: which developed countries have been successes over the last 30 years? And what do they have in common? Are the ones that have significantly restricted immigration done better (economically, etc.) or worse?
It's difficult to control for everything, but the fact that Finland has the highest cumulative GDP-per capita growth in the region and the lowest level of immigration stands out.
Umm.
Switzerland is highest at 122%, and has the highest proportion of the population being foreign born.
As I said, it's difficult to control for everything, but countries like Ireland and Switzerland have too many unique factors to make them useful reference points. The Nordic countries seem the most comparable.
The one country that stands out is the UK. Brexit perhaps? The countries that joined the EU in that period (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia) have done enormously well, except for Cyprus.
GDP per capita outside of London looks worse still.
GDP per capita in London benefits from the inward transfers to companies headquartered there. It's the same effect you see in Ireland where companies are nominally in Dublin but operate elsewhere. Can be quite meaningless except for D-waving by those in the centre.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
There’s a belief by some (which I hold) that Noriega and Paraguay were part of a “dump your bastards and our bastards) between Bush I and Gorbachev.
Note how a huge range of countries discovered democracy across Europe, Africa, Central and South America in 1989-199x. Paraguay and Panama were two of the holdouts.
In Paraguay, Stroessner got coup’d by his 2iC - who then introduced real democracy, to everyone’s astonishment.
In Panama, Pineapple Face held an election. Then managed to lose. Murdered the winning opposition leader. Then declared war on the US. Who kicked him out and replaced him with the winning VP candidate.
See also some fishy business in Prague, during the revolution there.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
There’s a belief by some (which I hold) that Noriega and Paraguay were part of a “dump your bastards and our bastards) between Bush I and Gorbachev.
Note how a huge range of countries discovered democracy across Europe, Africa, Central and South America in 1989-199x. Paraguay and Panama were two of the holdouts.
In Paraguay, Stroessner got coup’d by his 2iC - who then introduced real democracy, to everyone’s astonishment.
In Panama, Pineapple Face held an election. Then managed to lose. Murdered the winning opposition leader. Then declared war on the US. Who kicked him out and replaced him with the winning VP candidate.
See also some fishy business in Prague, during the revolution there.
The difference is the geopolitical context. I know that PB tends to go for moral absolutes but at the time of Panama there was no predatory power to embolden with the action. Russia was collapsing and China wasn't the rival it is now. Then it was a good thing to do with no consequences. Now it is possibly a good thing to do with massive downsides, namely the possible snuffing out of democracy in a large proportion of Ukraine and Taiwan.
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
Two very close calls for the VAR, and yes from the line on the pitch it looked like it would go the other way.
I think they should really have a margin in these decisions, such as ‘umpire’s call’ in cricket, where there needs to be an egregious error to overturn the decision of the officials on the ground.
No. Dispense with VAR and leave it to the referees and his or her linespersons
I commented favourably at the understated factuality of it last time I saw it, but later on there was a point where granny Ethel had frozen to death in her backs garden but, to paraphrase, everyone else had just Bally well got on with it - as if Ethel had let the side down.
I'm gonna go right out on a limb here and say that I bet Trump and co have not done any serious planning as to what happens next in Venezuela.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the way they've done it keeps almost all options open. It's much more intelligent than the way Saddam Hussian was handled on the eve of the second Gulf War.
I'm gonna go right out on a limb here and say that I bet Trump and co have not done any serious planning as to what happens next in Venezuela.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the way they've done it keeps almost all options open. It's much more intelligent than the way Saddam Hussian was handled on the eve of the second Gulf War.
Well, Trump was right about one thing. The drug trade is clearly totally out of control.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Dominic Cummings in an annoying idiot in so many ways, but there is one area concerning top quality leadership in which, while not exemplifying it, he is right. It is found in his chat with the Spectator, link below.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
I'll offer the thought no one has had a "vision" since Thatcher - there hasn't really been one. We've muddled along in this post-Thatcherite concensus ever since 1990 and you could argue the one person who really challenged it - Truss - was packed off in six weeks so the concensus, for all the moaning on here and elsewhere, broadly works.
Perhaps more accurately, no one has put forward an alternative which fits the changing socio-economic and demographic profile of our country - we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions.
Or, at the very least, the consensus works better than any of the alternatives that anyone has come up with. That it doesn't work as well as we might like (and some of its success has been by kicking problems into a future that's now the present) is our problem.
The 20th century saw all sorts of non-consensus ideas tried and found to fail horribly. The guardrails on capitalism and socialism are there for good reasons.
Going back to the header, the pop hits of (say) the 60s to the 90s were the way they were because that works. Sucks if you want to make new music now, of course. You either try to do things that have been done before, or you find a new niche that's objectively worse. But that's showbiz.
A vision. A narrative. A plan. If we eschew the tempting but incorrect "go together, can't be separated" I wonder which of these three things people would choose to have (in a PM) if they can only have one. I think I'd go with Plan. That's the hardest to do and it's essential. Visions and narratives need plans. Otherwise it's just hot air.
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
Probably the problem that underlies most of our other problems.
Stuff should get cheaper, better and more abundant as time goes by. Just by accumulation of technical knowledge, if nothing else.
And yet the cost of putting a roof over people's heads has done the opposite.
+1 - the fact is that the UK population increased by 10% but we didm't build the homes for a 2% increase let alone the 10-15% that was required.
So it's expensive to rent anywhere because supply of houses does not match demand hence rents increase until renters can pay no more...
Yet this govt seems totally hamstrung in doing something to get the market and building going. Be it tackling NIMBY groups, looking at excessive regulatory burden or whatever else they need to do. It’s one step forward two steps back.
They talk the talk. That’s it so far.
This is, verbatim what a chap called Starmer has to say on the matter in mid December last year, three weeks ago:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government
Now this is great, but he is nearly 6 years into being Labour leader and 18 months into being PM. By the time he was elected he (and we) should know the plan, and by now it should be rolling out fast and we should have at our fingertips the timetable for action and implementation.
As it is he is acting as if every single thing he knows he has has to work out since becoming PM, including every single thing that all PB posters know.
Does he know it can be hard to get a GP appointment and that the HMRC doesn't answer the phone?
HMRC eventually answer the phone and in some cases they do answer it almost instantly. The problem is a common one that everyone is overworked with a backlog to deal with and no government has invested the money in tackling the backlog.
I only got my tax refund processed after a call to HMRC, because it was stuck for months due to a security issue.
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
A major problem was Johnson and Mogg's insane focus on headcount reduction rather than spending cuts. Contrary to what most people seem to to believe, the vast majority of HMRC staff are employed in some form of customer facing role.
A big problem we have today is the superficiality of politics, across all sides of the House.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Dominic Cummings in an annoying idiot in so many ways, but there is one area concerning top quality leadership in which, while not exemplifying it, he is right. It is found in his chat with the Spectator, link below.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
I'll offer the thought no one has had a "vision" since Thatcher - there hasn't really been one. We've muddled along in this post-Thatcherite concensus ever since 1990 and you could argue the one person who really challenged it - Truss - was packed off in six weeks so the concensus, for all the moaning on here and elsewhere, broadly works.
Perhaps more accurately, no one has put forward an alternative which fits the changing socio-economic and demographic profile of our country - we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions.
Or, at the very least, the consensus works better than any of the alternatives that anyone has come up with. That it doesn't work as well as we might like (and some of its success has been by kicking problems into a future that's now the present) is our problem.
The 20th century saw all sorts of non-consensus ideas tried and found to fail horribly. The guardrails on capitalism and socialism are there for good reasons.
Going back to the header, the pop hits of (say) the 60s to the 90s were the way they were because that works. Sucks if you want to make new music now, of course. You either try to do things that have been done before, or you find a new niche that's objectively worse. But that's showbiz.
A vision. A narrative. A plan. If we eschew the tempting but incorrect "go together, can't be separated" I wonder which of these three things people would choose to have (in a PM) if they can only have one. I think I'd go with Plan. That's the hardest to do and it's essential. Visions and narratives need plans. Otherwise it's just hot air.
"Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just... *do* things."
Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen Statement by the Premier of Greenland, Jens Frederik Nielsen:
January 4, 2026
“🇬🇱 Let me state this calmly and clearly from the outset: there is neither reason for panic nor for concern.
The image shared by Katie Miller, depicting Greenland wrapped in an American flag, changes nothing whatsoever. Our country is not for sale, and our future is not decided by social media posts.
I'm gonna go right out on a limb here and say that I bet Trump and co have not done any serious planning as to what happens next in Venezuela.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the way they've done it keeps almost all options open. It's much more intelligent than the way Saddam Hussian was handled on the eve of the second Gulf War.
Well, Trump was right about one thing. The drug trade is clearly totally out of control.
Have you seen the potential shit show the World T20 is about to become?
I'm gonna go right out on a limb here and say that I bet Trump and co have not done any serious planning as to what happens next in Venezuela.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the way they've done it keeps almost all options open. It's much more intelligent than the way Saddam Hussian was handled on the eve of the second Gulf War.
Well, Trump was right about one thing. The drug trade is clearly totally out of control.
Have you seen the potential shit show the World T20 is about to become?
My first London bedsit, when I started work in a decent job, cost £42 a month in NW6, which AI tells me would now equate to £175. Can you get a bedsit in a reasonable part of London nowadays for £175 per month? I think not!
Or was that per week? I can’t now really remember. Perhaps £175 per week nowadays isn’t completely out of the range
My grotty one bedroom bedsit in Slough cost £5 a week in October 1965. My first job with ICI Paints after leaving University had a gross salary of less than £20 per week. It's all relative.
Some years later i shot a 48 sheet poster for ICI Paints of a can of tartan paint with the headline
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
There’s a belief by some (which I hold) that Noriega and Paraguay were part of a “dump your bastards and our bastards) between Bush I and Gorbachev.
Note how a huge range of countries discovered democracy across Europe, Africa, Central and South America in 1989-199x. Paraguay and Panama were two of the holdouts.
In Paraguay, Stroessner got coup’d by his 2iC - who then introduced real democracy, to everyone’s astonishment.
In Panama, Pineapple Face held an election. Then managed to lose. Murdered the winning opposition leader. Then declared war on the US. Who kicked him out and replaced him with the winning VP candidate.
See also some fishy business in Prague, during the revolution there.
The difference is the geopolitical context. I know that PB tends to go for moral absolutes but at the time of Panama there was no predatory power to embolden with the action. Russia was collapsing and China wasn't the rival it is now. Then it was a good thing to do with no consequences. Now it is possibly a good thing to do with massive downsides, namely the possible snuffing out of democracy in a large proportion of Ukraine and Taiwan.
Indeed - 1989 was coordinated by the major powers.
And, as you say, no steal. Panama, in fact resulted in the US leaving completely, leaving behind a representative democracy. Which has endured.
Paraguay was a CIA coup - which again ended in a democracy and no US presence.
I'm gonna go right out on a limb here and say that I bet Trump and co have not done any serious planning as to what happens next in Venezuela.
Politics is the art of the possible, and the way they've done it keeps almost all options open. It's much more intelligent than the way Saddam Hussian was handled on the eve of the second Gulf War.
Well, Trump was right about one thing. The drug trade is clearly totally out of control.
Have you seen the potential shit show the World T20 is about to become?
Fulham 1 Liverpool 1 after 60 minutes, both goals given by VAR having been originally flagged offside!
I'm officially fearful for West Ham's chances of staying up.
Astonishing VAR decision on Liverpool’s favour today, the actual lines on the pitch showed it to be offside. Even Carragher couldn’t believe it.
That's why they are called Li VAR pool.
Bollocks.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
Was that the game where Liverpool also had two sent off and lost to a last minute own goal?
Yup.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
People make mistakes, if you fired all referees after they made a mistake you wouldn't have any available to referee a match.
Football needs miked up referees that publicly explain their decisions to the players and the supporters. It also needs a rule that only the captains can discuss decisions with the referee. Prima donna referees and players don’t help. Neither do self important TV commentators.
It's such a simple thing that would end a lot of the play acting, crowding round the refs (which causes delays), that it is bizarre it has not been done.
It could be done without any changes in the Laws. All it needs is refs to start applying them. Why won't they? Because none of them are prepared to go out on limb. They know they wouldn't be backed by the FA. So they just carry on doing what everyone else does, which results in the chaotic and unsatisfactory situation which contrasts so obviously with what happens in other sports, such as rugby.
Miking up won't happen. It would give the refs too much authority. The FA don't want that. They want to keep a much control for themselves as possible.
The refs are miked up, and only the captains are allowed to talk to them!!!
"Albanian burglar who cannot be deported taunts Home Office from Mayfair nightclub Defiant criminal is seen with scantily clad dancers in latest video jibe at officials hamstrung by asylum claim"
Frantic backpedaling from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to AP: the US *won’t* govern Venezuela, but will press changes through an oil blockade.
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
The US has managed to replace one Venezuelan leader who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, with another Venezuelan leader who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process.
"Albanian burglar who cannot be deported taunts Home Office from Mayfair nightclub Defiant criminal is seen with scantily clad dancers in latest video jibe at officials hamstrung by asylum claim"
"Albanian burglar who cannot be deported taunts Home Office from Mayfair nightclub Defiant criminal is seen with scantily clad dancers in latest video jibe at officials hamstrung by asylum claim"
Comments
Whoever proposed the abolition of the helpline (Hunt?) wasn't thinking clearly that day.
https://x.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/2007563304718221349?s=20
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/2007828394193645704?s=20
So about all that having fixed the foundations while going further and faster to smash the gangs and being laser focused on growth in order to be fighting ready by 2035....
There may be some more improvements on the step the UK chose to place itself on, but the fundamental access/autonomy tradeoff remains.
And it finishes 2-2 at Craven Cottage, with another two goals in injury time!
It’s definitely a bit of a weird season this year.
Protest over climate crisis and AI has cut power to tens of thousands of homes which may take days to fully restore
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/leftwing-militants-responsibility-arson-attack-berlin-power-grid
How to make friends and influence people, cut of their power to a f##k load of people in the middle of sodding winter. That's not compaigning that is terrorism.
Housing costs considerably more than it did.
Housing costs are only relevant to those who are actually paying housing costs, if you're not paying housing costs then you don't affect the mean, median or modal average for housing costs.
If rates are 2.7% or lower in mid 2027 then my call will have paid off…
Probably a generation needs to pass with all the old players gone.
I have it as a target for my 100th birthday in 2043. Only 17 years to go. I'm looking forward to it.
'WHEN IT HAPPENS WE'II BE THERE FIRST'.
After I'd shot it ICI got cold feet in case they weren't so they wanted it changed to
'IF IT HAPPENS WE'LL BE THERE'
which the agency told them lost most of its impact but ICI insisted
Foote Cone and Belding. Really good times!!
Also Alan Parker and CDP.
I do think if Starmer talks about a closer relationship with the EU, as most people want, he needs to spell out what this means. Otherwise it's just words.
By me we have had, and still have, a few developments throwing up houses.
https://x.com/AKurmanaev/status/2007791331754820013
*Maduro's constant dancing became the last straw for Trump, he pressed the button
*White House settled on Delcy as an acceptable candidate. Her ability to edge up oil output under sanctions impressed some Trump officials
*Machado was never a frontrunner
The UK post-Brexit and over the long-term has grown faster than the Eurozone or comparison nations like Germany, not slower. So where is this 0.5% magically coming from?
And while the US system is (at times) unnecessarily complex, having non-immigrant limited term visas does give you a bit of an automatic stabalizer, because you have large numbers of people coming to the end of their term. Which I think allows the government a lot more control.
I think my preferred route would be to introduce non-immigrant visas with limited terms, but allow people who have passed certain tests (employment, tax paying, civic service, no criminal record) to move onto immigrant visas.
That would -I think- be the best of both worlds.
And for what it's worth, the O-1 (which I'm on) does have an immigrant cousin, the EB1A. If you qualify for the O-1, you usually can qualify for the EB1A, but it's a time consuming and expensive process to shift between the two.
1) It’s now impossible to negotiate much more than has already been agreed this side of the UK election, noting impending votes within the EU, and the EU can read the opinion polls too.
2) Russia’s little helpers within the EU would use anything they had veto rights over to play games on Ukraine.
We will oscillate in and out of various things depending on who is in power, but the U.K. position is now pretty fixed. No Customs Union, but alignment on agriculture and goods related stuff we’d do anyway because they are the biggest market for org businesses. None of the rest.
However, in a world without US presence in Europe, we are going to matter to each other as allies, so there’s a bit of wiggle room to find the best, mutually beneficial version of all that.
Getting stuff right and doing it well is hard work, and requires superb political skills. No ifs, no buts.
Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile in joint statement Sunday say they «reject the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, infringing the fundamental principles of international law» and reiterate «concerns about any attempt at the external administration or appropriation of natural or strategic resources» in a clear reference to energy resources.
https://x.com/mariatad/status/2007869611149246677?s=20
Starmer told Laura Kuenssberg on her BBC show on Sunday: “Under the last government we saw constant chopping and changing of leadership, of teams — it caused utter chaos, utter chaos, and it’s amongst the reasons that the Tories were booted out so effectively at the last election.
Quote from The Times… if it’s not in the national interest to chop and change Prime Ministers, and doing so causes utter chaos, why did he keep demanding the Tory PM’s resign?
I think they should really have a margin in these decisions, such as ‘umpire’s call’ in cricket, where there needs to be an egregious error to overturn the decision of the officials on the ground.
Liverpool were the victims of the most disgraceful VAR decision in history as this Luis Diaz goal was ruled offside.
How the refs/linos are still allowed to officiate is a mystery.
PM type leadership is not about meaningless speeches and cosying backbenchers. It's about having a vision and getting stuff done. This requires a ruthlessness in team building, getting rid of dead wood, annoying placemen, overcoming obstacles, ignoring opposition, bullying people where you have to, making enemies and getting those with ability on your side. The buck stops with you externally, internally you are remorseless in supporting the good and marginalising the useless.
Our system, MPs and party members don't have the ability or the mechanisms for testing out whether someone has these qualities.
In my life I have seen these qualities in great measure close up in about two people.
Mrs T, obviously, comes closest in my political lifetime. Attlee must be another worth a look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQm4PQn-E4k
FAFO.
More than a tad brisk in downtown East Ham this afternoon.
Arguably not quite as cold however as some of the commentary on the Venezuela well, what shall we call it, "raid", "incursion", "extraction"? (the last sounds vaguely dental).
Does one country have the right (as distinct from the means) to remove from power the ruler of another country it doesn't like? It's not a question of whether they could or even should but is there a legal basis for such actions? Is that how international politics should be conducted?
Clearly, Maduro is no saint and the immediate response from those seeking to justify the American action starts from that. Well, yes, but if you were to seek to remove from power every ruler who is an authoritarian who uses violence and terror to control the population and a corrupted electoral system to maintain a facade of a democratic process, well, you'd need plenty of prison space.
If we therefore accept not all leaders are saints, so do those who are (or claim to be) have the legal and moral right to remove the sinners? Power corrupts as a wise man once said and is it not part of human nature to seek to control and retain such power once it is obtained in some cultures and societies?
With Trump, you have the benefit of very little proper spin - we all know it's not about the drugs but the oil (a different kind of drug, you might argue) and while Venezulean oil isn't Texas light, to have such resources in American control obviously helps the USA and especially American big business and hinders its economic and political rivals.
I was musing yesterday whether the parallel was with Noriega in Panama - in fact, look at how the USSR "managed" the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945. Whether it was Nagy or Dubcek, the political re-ordering of the country was supervised by Moscow and involved such leaders being "invited" to the Soviet capital- will we see similar here with a post-Maduro Venezulea being politically "managed" from Washington?
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mbmifb5obk22
https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2026/01/03/protesting-farmers-increase-pressure-warn-of-48h-roadblocks-and-tractors-in-athens/
Can't find any reports of it here (as opposed to the air traffic control problem), but was told about it by a Greek cafe owner today who was complaining about not being able to source Greek foodstuffs.
Perhaps more accurately, no one has put forward an alternative which fits the changing socio-economic and demographic profile of our country - we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions.
PGMOL admitted Jota shouldn't have been sent off.
https://x.com/niohberg/status/2007852844582646071
The 20th century saw all sorts of non-consensus ideas tried and found to fail horribly. The guardrails on capitalism and socialism are there for good reasons.
Going back to the header, the pop hits of (say) the 60s to the 90s were the way they were because that works. Sucks if you want to make new music now, of course. You either try to do things that have been done before, or you find a new niche that's objectively worse. But that's showbiz.
But yes, joking aside rugby does it well, both in explaining decisions and the conduct of players towards officials.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Parker+lady+penelope+keith#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:ce40f943,vid:spTqlpekjmg,st:0
Miking up won't happen. It would give the refs too much authority. The FA don't want that. They want to keep a much control for themselves as possible.
your bastards and our bastards) between Bush I and Gorbachev.
Note how a huge range of countries discovered democracy across Europe, Africa, Central and South America in 1989-199x. Paraguay and Panama were two of the holdouts.
In Paraguay, Stroessner got coup’d by his 2iC - who then introduced real democracy, to everyone’s astonishment.
In Panama, Pineapple Face held an election. Then managed to lose. Murdered the winning opposition leader. Then declared war on the US. Who kicked him out and replaced him with the winning VP candidate.
See also some fishy business in Prague, during the revolution there.
TRUMP: "I'm going to run Venezuela."
Oh, honey . . . you can't even run the Kennedy Center.
https://bsky.app/profile/mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3mbmmcbzdzc23
I commented favourably at the understated factuality of it last time I saw it, but later on there was a point where granny Ethel had frozen to death in her backs garden but, to paraphrase, everyone else had just Bally well got on with it - as if Ethel had let the side down.
@OJoelsen
Statement by the Premier of Greenland, Jens Frederik Nielsen:
January 4, 2026
“🇬🇱 Let me state this calmly and clearly from the outset: there is neither reason for panic nor for concern.
The image shared by Katie Miller, depicting Greenland wrapped in an American flag, changes nothing whatsoever. Our country is not for sale, and our future is not decided by social media posts.
https://x.com/OJoelsen/status/2007842019893277131
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/articles/cz6yjz23w19o
Look on the bright side, you're still a bigger club than Arsenal, you've won more UEFA competitions than the Woolwich.
And, as you say, no steal. Panama, in fact resulted in the US leaving completely, leaving behind a representative democracy. Which has endured.
Paraguay was a CIA coup - which again ended in a democracy and no US presence.
This may or may not be related to my interest in getting tickets to the World T20…
1. Arrest the President
2. Steal millions of dollars in oil revenue.
I admit there may be some gaps
Defiant criminal is seen with scantily clad dancers in latest video jibe at officials hamstrung by asylum claim"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/04/albanian-burglar-cannot-be-deported-taunts-mayfair-club/
There’s no underpants on that plan.
Frantic backpedaling from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to AP: the US *won’t* govern Venezuela, but will press changes through an oil blockade.
Already finding it harder than they imagined.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mbmpf3qtas2x
The one benefit of anti-white discrimination
Talent rebuffed does not vanish – it migrates"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/04/the-one-benefit-of-anti-white-discrimination
https://x.com/thebabylonbee/status/2007897351332007966
“British Ask If Trump Can Please Do That Same Thing With Keir Starmer”
So, Rubio says the US will not govern Venezuela, beyond continuing their oil blockade as a way to exert pressure. Trump was lying and/or senile.