If those people had come from another part of the UK - say Welsh speakers from Caernarfon - would they also have caused local people to lose out?
This sounds to me like a preamble for an internationalist gambit, where you are going to tell us there isnt any real difference between people coming to do a job from Caernarfon than there is from Krakow, although most people start being a bit coy when attempts are made to extend the comparison to say Lahore.
Care to try answering the question?
It wont change the demand for labour within the country one jot. The wages might drop slightly in one area, and rise slightly in another as supply tightens there. Adding supply to a system is going to make wages drop, moving it around within a system won't. So like I said the only way your argument is coherent is if you try and argue the system is the whole of the EU - and the public disagreed with you on that six months ago.
The effect on local people, on wages, on demand for public services, is identical. Thank you for acknowledging that.
The difference is therefore about identity, not economics. I'm pleased we've cleared that up.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
If those people had come from another part of the UK - say Welsh speakers from Caernarfon - would they also have caused local people to lose out?
This sounds to me like a preamble for an internationalist gambit, where you are going to tell us there isnt any real difference between people coming to do a job from Caernarfon than there is from Krakow, although most people start being a bit coy when attempts are made to extend the comparison to say Lahore.
Care to try answering the question?
It wont change the demand for labour within the country one jot. The wages might drop slightly in one area, and rise slightly in another as supply tightens there. Adding supply to a system is going to make wages drop, moving it around within a system won't. So like I said the only way your argument is coherent is if you try and argue the system is the whole of the EU - and the public disagreed with you on that six months ago.
Pretty basic economics.
And If we go a little further than the facile 'but they pay in more than they take out in cash benefits' argument that plagues this debate because it is framed in a liberal, internationalist fashion:
Just for starters, a common language would prevent the need for public money to be wasted on interpreters/school language for non nationals courses.
Internal movement also means that there would also be less of an impact (perhaps loss of taxes, perhaps loss of talent) on the nation of those emigrating. Something the selfless pro immigration lobby never consider.
And perhaps for me the most important issue, stolen from Max, is that free movement breaks the social contract between business, government and the people. The same pro immigration lobby that bemoans the lack of skills in our native population seem surprisingly deaf to the notion that there is some cause and effect here. Making it very hard (I.e. Very costly) to employ pharmacists, say, from abroad, would result in the upskilling of our own population funded by those who profit from pharmacists. If a pharmacist moves from Wales to Dorset (as our next door neighbours did), then rather than importing a pharmacist from abroad the sector should be taking on more native trainees.
This is as much the problem as anything else. The public know that Labour lied through their teeth about immigration because their own people have said so, in the same statements as they heard such bon mots as "rubbing the Right's face in diversity".
They also strongly suspect that the Tories lied through their teeth about immigration because of all the evasions and obfuscations when it turned out the number of NI numbers issued was vastly larger than the number of immigrants supposedly arriving.
Coming clean about the numbers, demonstrably investing a commensurate amount into health, education and housing would go a significant way to calming peoples nerves. What it wont do is get around the basic problem of lots of older and poorer people with possibly a rather parochial outlook being very uncomfortable about lots of unfamiliar languages being spoken in their towns, and lots of buildings connected with unfamiliar cultures and religions being built near where they live.
Indeed.
My 'supermarket test' is, I think, a good indicator not just of the change brought by immigration but the continuous nature of it.
A decade ago young Polish ** blokes became noticeable among supermarket customers, a couple of years later it was young Polish couples, then it was young Polish couples with children. In the last couple of years I've noticed what looked like Polish grandparents with young children and whole families of East European Roma in the supermarket. What the next five years will bring I've no idea but I don't doubt that there will be new groupings to see.
I'm far enough up the socioeconomic scale that I'm probably a net beneficiary from immigration but I know many people who aren't as fortunate as I am and they are definitely losing out from the effects of immigration.
** 'Polish' also includes Lithuanians, Latvians etc
If those people had come from another part of the UK - say Welsh speakers from Caernarfon - would they also have caused local people to lose out?
People from different parts of the UK internally migrate in all directions and I'm not aware of that causing issues.
Now if you want to go back a couple of generations some of my ancestors did migrate from Wales to Yorkshire for work purposes.
And you know what they had a similar language and culture and level of economic development as the area they migrated into.
While the various levels of government and employers made extra provisions of housing, infrastructure and public services to provide for the internal migration. Nor did the then government repeatedly lie about what was happening.
If those people had come from another part of the UK - say Welsh speakers from Caernarfon - would they also have caused local people to lose out?
This sounds to me like a preamble for an internationalist gambit, where you are going to tell us there isnt any real difference between people coming to do a job from Caernarfon than there is from Krakow, although most people start being a bit coy when attempts are made to extend the comparison to say Lahore.
Care to try answering the question?
It wont change the demand for labour within the country one jot. The wages might drop slightly in one area, and rise slightly in another as supply tightens there. Adding supply to a system is going to make wages drop, moving it around within a system won't. So like I said the only way your argument is coherent is if you try and argue the system is the whole of the EU - and the public disagreed with you on that six months ago.
The effect on local people, on wages, on demand for public services, is identical. Thank you for acknowledging that.
The difference is therefore about identity, not economics. I'm pleased we've cleared that up.
People want people in their country, part of their community to get the benefit of any economic development before people arriving from other countries, this can come as a shock only to a leftie internationalist. Just as I said in my reply a few minute ago which you poo pooed, colour me shocked. Its the same in just about any country in the world, locals get first dibs on any jobs.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
I've never worked in a call centre but it's more academically demanding than coal mining was when it was a seriously large employer, isn't it? You need to be literate to work in a call centre. It seems low-skilled to us now, but that's because nearly everyone is now quite highly educated compared to the equivalent a few generations ago.
That said it's possible that automation will suddenly blow through whole industries and eliminate jobs at a rate that'll leave societies struggling to adjust. It's also plausible that the machines will just decide things will work better without wandering around making a mess of things, and that'll be the end of us.
The problem with the EU borders position is it is no more defensible to say its fine for unlimited people to come from Eastern Europe than it is to say they should be equally free to come from anywhere is Africa or Asia - of course the country might be a little crowded by then.
Of course it's more defensible. Europe has a shared heritage as the home of European civilization.
Viewed from China your comment would be seen as absurd.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
I've never worked in a call centre but it's more academically demanding than coal mining was when it was a seriously large employer, isn't it? You need to be literate to work in a call centre. It seems low-skilled to us now, but that's because nearly everyone is now quite highly educated compared to the equivalent a few generations ago.
That said it's possible that automation will suddenly blow through whole industries and eliminate jobs at a rate that'll leave societies struggling to adjust. It's also plausible that the machines will just decide things will work better without wandering around making a mess of things, and that'll be the end of us.
Having spent a decade or so writing call centre software I would suggest its only marginally more skilled in most cases, sure there is a requirement to read, but most miners would be able to read well enough, its only reading a script in conversational English. The rest of the operation is driven by a computer, it tells you what to say next, gives you the questions to ask the customer and buttons to click according to their answer. In most call centres as soon as the customer pushes the operator off their script they are told to escalate to a supervisor.
There is an entirely plausible scenario where automated vehicles displace 3/4 of Truck drivers within the next decade, which in the US means finding a new job for 2.5m Americans with very little skill rather quickly.
It is estimated that nearly half of American jobs are potentially automatable within the next two decades.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
The trouble is, the jobs up the food chain are looking as vulnerable as the manual ones (if not more so). The jobs of doctors and lawyers and middle management boil down to applying some fairly straightforward algorithms to some fairly repetitive sets of facts. What is good at repetitive algorithm-application?
And of course we can't keep hardware & software out of the country like we can people (there will not be a camp of personal injury software packages trying to infiltrate us from Calais.
A very good article from Mr H and some interesting comments below the line.
From a Labour perspective, I believe we need to revisit the Blue Labour ideas in order to focus the party on working class communities around the country and escape the cliché of the Islington bubble.
There was an item on the local news the other day featuring the annual Christmas dinner for ex-miners in Kellingley. Of course, now there are only ex-miners in Kellingley, but the community is still pulling together. Let that be an inspiration to the Labour Party. It's why we were founded, after all.
One thing that Jezza has right is that he is not parachuting in SPADS from London in byelections. He is respecting local choices in all the ones under his tenure, and I expect the same in 2017, and Momentum don't seem to be interfering either.
I can see that the PLP will be a very different beast after the next election, and much better rooted in grassroots Labour politics. This may be unintentional, but it may well be the biggest seachange since New Labour.
I am not spinning, I accept that it maybe overall net positive, that's why I say it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
This may or may not be true, but it isn't justified by the evidence you've quoted. The poor aren't uniquely in that sector, and they can and do move into different sectors.
The poor aren't uniquely in the lowest paid jobs?
They don't uniquely work in unskilled and semi-skilled *services*, no. And you should still count what happens to these people if they move out of those jobs into better jobs. They may in the process stop being poor, which is a good thing. Immigration (like other forms of trade) helps make this happen.
On the broader point, do you really believe that flooding the market with a cheaper option doesn't bring prices down?
Of that particular thing, that would usually be the direct effect. But the story doesn't end there, that particular thing is part of an economy of other things, grouped together in supply chains, and if you can make one part of the chain cheaper, that increases the value of other parts. Humans aren't perfectly interchangeable commodities, so if you bring in somebody who can do task X more cheaply, they can't necessarily do task Y more cheaply, and Y has now become more valuable. That works out well for the person who ends up doing task Y, even if they were originally doing task X.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
Re automation, we could indeed. My own job as odds compiler has been largely made redundant by the Betfair market.
So if uncontrolled immigration is so good for the economy why has the decade of uncontrolled immigrated seen stagnant GDP per capita, over a trillion pound increase in government debt and rising inequality ?
As to the NHS it managed to function well enough before uncontrolled immigration - are you saying without uncontrolled immigration it would grind to a halt ?
1) Correlation not causation. The rise in government debt sprang from a recession deeper than the 1930s and weak wages growth partly comes from that and partly from poor productivity, lack of investment in infrastructure, poor skills of the native-born population and an unlimited willingness on the part of soil disant deficit hawks to spunk huge sums of money instead on hobby horse projects like Brexit.
2) As you know, that was not what I wrote.
Something like 75% of the nurses on the ward my other half was on were immigrants (I saw only two white English nurses, one of whom had a Jewish surname, so if anything I'm understating the value of immigration to that ward). Perhaps you have every faith in the British state setting up a bureaucratic infrastructure that will allow for that flow to continue unimpeded at all times without affecting service standards at a time when NHS funding is being kept under lock tight restraint. Quaint.
1) So you won't answer the question - I'll ask it again.
If uncontrolled immigration is so good for the economy why has the decade of uncontrolled immigrated seen stagnant GDP per capita, over a trillion pound increase in government debt and rising inequality
All the reasons you try to give applied also before the era of uncontrolled immigration and yet there wasn't stagnant GDP per capita or a trillion pounds of government borrowing.
In fact the uncontrolled immigration you support has had damaging effects on productivity, wages growth, capital investment and infrastructure.
2) You may not have wrote it but you are a supporter of uncontrolled immigration.
You are assuming that your London NHS experiences are the same as those for the rest of the country. You need to broaden your outlook and see what happens among the people you refer to as 'carrot crunchers'.
And please explain how the NHS managed to operate before the era of uncontrolled immigration.
You seem to have lost the ability to read. The worst recession in 80 years played the starring part.
Apparently, if we hadn't had immigration, we'd have somehow avoided the GFC...
Instead of trying to desperately pick holes you could come up with some counter evidence. You know, just a suggestion.
The one potential benefit of Brexit, and even Trumpery, is the opportunity to reconsider the tired debates that have held us back. We haven't seen that yet, though.
In short, mass immigration makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. That's why politicians are so in favour of it and cast aspersions upon anyone who tells the truth about it
I didn't say that. There's very little evidence to support that (if any). What we can say is that we are relying on immigration instead of training and developing our own people. We could have both, or neither.
You don't want to admit it, but it's the truth. There are mountains of evidence, not least the arguments put forward by people on here when they dmsupport immigration by pointing out it has only meant a tiny decrease in wages at the lower end since 2004, as if that was good news
Can you supply any evidence? It's an area of deep interest to me and I'd been keen to see it.
Do you really need me to do that for you? Or is that code for 'I don't believe you, you're making it up to support a prejudice'?
If it really was an area of deep interest to you, you surely would have seen the evidence
.
Just google 'immigration affect on wages'. The pro immigration argument is that it's only a 1% decrease over 12 years. Hooray get the Lambrusco out!!
Not significant in the bigger mix.
Says someone who does well out of it!
Flooding the labour market with cheap competition so the poorest people get a 12 year pay freeze turns out to be unpopular with the poor but popular with the rich - what a shocker!
You're not really dealing in fact. By the very evidence you cite, it's not true that "flooding the market" has created a 12 year pay freeze. There are numerous factors with a much larger impact.
Ok 'relative' pay freeze then, get the Champers out.
I know we have a lot of bullshit political spin on this site but even British politicians would draw the line at phrasing "has no effect on wages" as "causes a relative pay freeze".
Well the truth, according to the source that is pro mass immigration, is 'a negative effect on wages'
Re automation, we could indeed. My own job as odds compiler has been largely made redundant by the Betfair market.
So how far do you go with this, do you think the poor would be better off now if Ned Ludd had won and they'd stopped the industrial revolution at the knitting machines?
"A report by the TUC, published on Wednesday, shows that real earnings have declined more than 10% since the credit crunch began in 2007, leaving the UK equal bottom in a league table of wages growth.
Using data from the OECD’s recent employment outlook, the TUC found that over the same 2007-2015 period, real wages grew in Poland by 23%, in Germany by 14%, and in France by 11%. Across the OECD, real wages increased by an average of 6.7%.
The TUC found that between 2007 and 2015 in the UK, real wages – income from work adjusted for inflation – fell by 10.4%. That drop was equalled only by Greece in a list of 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The UK, Greece and Portugal were the only three OECD countries that saw real wages fall."
So the argument that the GFC, which by universal admission was a worldwide phenomenon, has a major bearing on what has happened in the UK doesn't really stand up.
"A report by the TUC, published on Wednesday, shows that real earnings have declined more than 10% since the credit crunch began in 2007, leaving the UK equal bottom in a league table of wages growth.
Using data from the OECD’s recent employment outlook, the TUC found that over the same 2007-2015 period, real wages grew in Poland by 23%, in Germany by 14%, and in France by 11%. Across the OECD, real wages increased by an average of 6.7%.
The TUC found that between 2007 and 2015 in the UK, real wages – income from work adjusted for inflation – fell by 10.4%. That drop was equalled only by Greece in a list of 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The UK, Greece and Portugal were the only three OECD countries that saw real wages fall."
So the argument that the GFC, which by universal admission was a worldwide phenomenon, has a major bearing on what has happened in the UK doesn't really stand up.
PS I hate the quoting system.
Look on the brightside, with that sort of wagegrowth in the EU, we will all be able to move there... Oh wait.
The problem with the EU borders position is it is no more defensible to say its fine for unlimited people to come from Eastern Europe than it is to say they should be equally free to come from anywhere is Africa or Asia - of course the country might be a little crowded by then.
Of course it's more defensible. Europe has a shared heritage as the home of European civilization.
Viewed from China your comment would be seen as absurd.
It is a heritage we have imposed, rightly or wrongly, upon the world and which has therefore through our own actions become a shared world heritage. In terms of politics, trade, morals and to some extent culture we are now insisting that the whole world follows our model whilst at the same time saying that 93% of the world's population are not good enough for us because of where they were born.
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
The trouble is, the jobs up the food chain are looking as vulnerable as the manual ones (if not more so). The jobs of doctors and lawyers and middle management boil down to applying some fairly straightforward algorithms to some fairly repetitive sets of facts. What is good at repetitive algorithm-application?
And of course we can't keep hardware & software out of the country like we can people (there will not be a camp of personal injury software packages trying to infiltrate us from Calais.
Future globalisation is likely to hit middle class professional jobs as hard as previous globalisations hit working class jobs.
Its not only computerisation but the internet removes the need for many tasks currently undertaken by teachers, lecturers and doctors in the western world.
Re automation, we could indeed. My own job as odds compiler has been largely made redundant by the Betfair market.
So how far do you go with this, do you think the poor would be better off now if Ned Ludd had won and they'd stopped the industrial revolution at the knitting machines?
The problem with the EU borders position is it is no more defensible to say its fine for unlimited people to come from Eastern Europe than it is to say they should be equally free to come from anywhere is Africa or Asia - of course the country might be a little crowded by then.
Of course it's more defensible. Europe has a shared heritage as the home of European civilization.
Viewed from China your comment would be seen as absurd.
So your argument would be that we should let people in from Bulgaria but not from say the USA or Singapore because they have more of a shared culture with us, its a view I suppose.
Re automation, we could indeed. My own job as odds compiler has been largely made redundant by the Betfair market.
So how far do you go with this, do you think the poor would be better off now if Ned Ludd had won and they'd stopped the industrial revolution at the knitting machines?
New industrial jobs replaced low productivity agricultural work.
New service sector jobs replaced low productivity industrial work.
What we seem to have now is globalisation / computerisation etc replacing skilled work and we're not replacing that with government borrowing rather than employment of equal or higher value.
We need, IMO, to look more at quality of life issues rather than the obsession with GDP.
So if uncontrolled immigration is so good for the economy why has the decade of uncontrolled immigrated seen stagnant GDP per capita, over a trillion pound increase in government debt and rising inequality ?
As to the NHS it managed to function well enough before uncontrolled immigration - are you saying without uncontrolled immigration it would grind to a halt ?
1) Correlation not causation. The rise in government debt sprang from a recession deeper than the 1930s and weak wages growth partly comes from that and partly from poor productivity, lack of investment in infrastructure, poor skills of the native-born population and an unlimited willingness on the part of soil disant deficit hawks to spunk huge sums of money instead on hobby horse projects like Brexit.
2) As you know, that was not what I wrote.
Something like 75% of the nurses on the ward my other half was on were immigrants (I saw only two white English nurses, one of whom had a Jewish surname, so if anything I'm understating the value of immigration to that ward). Perhaps you have every faith in the British state setting up a bureaucratic infrastructure that will allow for that flow to continue unimpeded at all times without affecting service standards at a time when NHS funding is being kept under lock tight restraint. Quaint.
1) So you won't answer the question - I'll ask it again.
If uncontrolled immigration is so good for the economy why has the decade of uncontrolled immigrated seen stagnant GDP per capita, over a trillion pound increase in government debt and rising inequality
All the reasons you try to give applied also before the era of uncontrolled immigration and yet there wasn't stagnant GDP per capita or a trillion pounds of government borrowing.
In fact the uncontrolled immigration you support has had damaging effects on productivity, wages growth, capital investment and infrastructure.
2) You may not have wrote it but you are a supporter of uncontrolled immigration.
You are assuming that your London NHS experiences are the same as those for the rest of the country. You need to broaden your outlook and see what happens among the people you refer to as 'carrot crunchers'.
And please explain how the NHS managed to operate before the era of uncontrolled immigration.
You seem to have lost the ability to read. The worst recession in 80 years played the starring part.
Apparently, if we hadn't had immigration, we'd have somehow avoided the GFC...
PS. We could be having exactly the same conversation over automation.
The argument over automation I find much harder to swallow. If machines take over the bulk of the manual professions there appears to be an unwarranted assumption that the displaced manual workers can move up the food chain and take on better paying jobs.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
The trouble is, the jobs up the food chain are looking as vulnerable as the manual ones (if not more so). The jobs of doctors and lawyers and middle management boil down to applying some fairly straightforward algorithms to some fairly repetitive sets of facts. What is good at repetitive algorithm-application?
And of course we can't keep hardware & software out of the country like we can people (there will not be a camp of personal injury software packages trying to infiltrate us from Calais.
Future globalisation is likely to hit middle class professional jobs as hard as previous globalisations hit working class jobs.
Its not only computerisation but the internet removes the need for many tasks currently undertaken by teachers, lecturers and doctors in the western world.
On the twelfth day of Brexmas, the Daily Express promised me Twelve foreigners fleeing, Eleven immigrants packing, Ten years a-booming, Nine lords interfering, Eight ethnics a-plotting, Seven migrants a-swimming, Six Remoaners a-whingeing, Five false things, Four cures for Alzheimers, Three freezing blizzards, Two Diana conspiracies, And an instant Article Fif-tee.
We need, IMO, to look more at quality of life issues rather than the obsession with GDP.
You dont have to tell me, I make below the UK NMW here in the tropics, but life is good - well except for the odd Christmas typhoon anyway
The usual answer given to automation is something along the lines of Citizens Income, although its never clear where the money is coming from to pay for this in a globalised world - if you try and tax the remaining rich enough to pay for it, they are liable to pick up their ball and move to another less demanding jurisdiction.
"Family speaking Polish at the next table. Should I tell them to piss off? or smile and wish them a Happy Winterval?
Some advice please from the PB elite..."
How do you say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in Polish? Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia! That is the way to say "Merry Christmas" in Polish. Among Poles, wherever they are, the most beloved and beautiful of all traditional festivities is that of Christmas Eve. It is then that the Wigilia, or Christmas Eve Dinner is served.
Wigilia - Polish American Cultural Center www.polishamericancenter.org/Wigilia.htm
That is a genuine cut and paste by the way; it is not (as far as I know) actually the Polish for "Go stick your head in a pig."
How do you say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in Polish? Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia! That is the way to say "Merry Christmas" in Polish. Among Poles, wherever they are, the most beloved and beautiful of all traditional festivities is that of Christmas Eve. It is then that the Wigilia, or Christmas Eve Dinner is served.
Comments
The difference is therefore about identity, not economics. I'm pleased we've cleared that up.
One the face of it the idea appears to be that a chap that left school with minimal qualifications and became a forklift driver, and has now been displaced by automated warehousing can now find a job as a robotics technician. He may well not have the abilities to cope with the demands of such a job.
In previous revolutions there has been a migration of labour from academically undemanding jobs, to other academically undemanding jobs - coal miners to call centre operatives. In the future most jobs that require little thought will be done by machines, where do the people whose forte is not thinking but doing go ?
And If we go a little further than the facile 'but they pay in more than they take out in cash benefits' argument that plagues this debate because it is framed in a liberal, internationalist fashion:
Just for starters, a common language would prevent the need for public money to be wasted on interpreters/school language for non nationals courses.
Internal movement also means that there would also be less of an impact (perhaps loss of taxes, perhaps loss of talent) on the nation of those emigrating. Something the selfless pro immigration lobby never consider.
And perhaps for me the most important issue, stolen from Max, is that free movement breaks the social contract between business, government and the people. The same pro immigration lobby that bemoans the lack of skills in our native population seem surprisingly deaf to the notion that there is some cause and effect here. Making it very hard (I.e. Very costly) to employ pharmacists, say, from abroad, would result in the upskilling of our own population funded by those who profit from pharmacists. If a pharmacist moves from Wales to Dorset (as our next door neighbours did), then rather than importing a pharmacist from abroad the sector should be taking on more native trainees.
Now if you want to go back a couple of generations some of my ancestors did migrate from Wales to Yorkshire for work purposes.
And you know what they had a similar language and culture and level of economic development as the area they migrated into.
While the various levels of government and employers made extra provisions of housing, infrastructure and public services to provide for the internal migration. Nor did the then government repeatedly lie about what was happening.
That said it's possible that automation will suddenly blow through whole industries and eliminate jobs at a rate that'll leave societies struggling to adjust. It's also plausible that the machines will just decide things will work better without wandering around making a mess of things, and that'll be the end of us.
Viewed from China your comment would be seen as absurd.
There is an entirely plausible scenario where automated vehicles displace 3/4 of Truck drivers within the next decade, which in the US means finding a new job for 2.5m Americans with very little skill rather quickly.
It is estimated that nearly half of American jobs are potentially automatable within the next two decades.
And of course we can't keep hardware & software out of the country like we can people (there will not be a camp of personal injury software packages trying to infiltrate us from Calais.
I can see that the PLP will be a very different beast after the next election, and much better rooted in grassroots Labour politics. This may be unintentional, but it may well be the biggest seachange since New Labour.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/our-automated-future
PS The next stage is to make Betfair redundant and replace it with 700 lines of smart contract code.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/27/uk-joins-greece-at-bottom-of-wage-growth-league-tuc-oecd
"A report by the TUC, published on Wednesday, shows that real earnings have declined more than 10% since the credit crunch began in 2007, leaving the UK equal bottom in a league table of wages growth.
Using data from the OECD’s recent employment outlook, the TUC found that over the same 2007-2015 period, real wages grew in Poland by 23%, in Germany by 14%, and in France by 11%. Across the OECD, real wages increased by an average of 6.7%.
The TUC found that between 2007 and 2015 in the UK, real wages – income from work adjusted for inflation – fell by 10.4%. That drop was equalled only by Greece in a list of 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The UK, Greece and Portugal were the only three OECD countries that saw real wages fall."
So the argument that the GFC, which by universal admission was a worldwide phenomenon, has a major bearing on what has happened in the UK doesn't really stand up.
PS I hate the quoting system.
Its not only computerisation but the internet removes the need for many tasks currently undertaken by teachers, lecturers and doctors in the western world.
I openly say I'd be in favour of protectionist measures for the lower paid. I don't see things in terms of GDP before social coherence and happiness.
Free movement of EU Labour as long as the job pays more than the national average maybe?
Christmas greetings to all on PB from Mrs Stodge and me.
Thank you David for another thought provoking piece. A huge subject requiring a detailed response which I've no time to provide now.
Politically parties unburdened by ideology and history will adapt more quickly but events are challenging long held assumptions and preconceptions.
It should be a time for thought and debate within and across parties as neither Right nor Left has a monopoly on the answers.
In the past, PB provided that forum. It would be nice to think it still does.
Exciting and Terrifying, in equal measure.
New service sector jobs replaced low productivity industrial work.
What we seem to have now is globalisation / computerisation etc replacing skilled work and we're not replacing that with government borrowing rather than employment of equal or higher value.
We need, IMO, to look more at quality of life issues rather than the obsession with GDP.
Some advice please from the PB elite...
Twelve foreigners fleeing,
Eleven immigrants packing,
Ten years a-booming,
Nine lords interfering,
Eight ethnics a-plotting,
Seven migrants a-swimming,
Six Remoaners a-whingeing,
Five false things,
Four cures for Alzheimers,
Three freezing blizzards,
Two Diana conspiracies,
And an instant Article Fif-tee.
The usual answer given to automation is something along the lines of Citizens Income, although its never clear where the money is coming from to pay for this in a globalised world - if you try and tax the remaining rich enough to pay for it, they are liable to pick up their ball and move to another less demanding jurisdiction.
Some advice please from the PB elite..."
How do you say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in Polish?
Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia! That is the way to say "Merry Christmas" in Polish. Among Poles, wherever they are, the most beloved and beautiful of all traditional festivities is that of Christmas Eve. It is then that the Wigilia, or Christmas Eve Dinner is served.
Wigilia - Polish American Cultural Center
www.polishamericancenter.org/Wigilia.htm
That is a genuine cut and paste by the way; it is not (as far as I know) actually the Polish for "Go stick your head in a pig."
Vesna Vulovic, stewardess who survived 33,000ft fall, dies
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38427411
new thread
get off your phone and PB and talk to the person / group you actually went out to dinner with for Christmas Eve. .......
In regard to question wish them happy Christmas ......why wouldn't you? If you can do it in polish so much the better.
Wesołych Świąt. By the way and no, I don't know how to pronounce it.