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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tories are on the run over the public sector pay cap. So why is Don Brind frustrated by Labour’s campaign?
.@Theresa_May can find £1 billion to keep her own job, but can’t find the money so nurses and teachers can keep theirs. #PMQs #NHSBirthday pic.twitter.com/EedylEeWFf
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I don't see anything in Labour's offering that would tackle either low productivity or the trade deficit.
The left wing belief that deficits don't matter, because public spending pays for itself, is as delusional as the belief of US Republicans that deficits don't matter because tax cuts pay for themselves.
The Brexiteers have been poking us for long enough, and once they got the vote they wanted it emerges they are mostly clueless. Just desserts, I'd say.
Top of the list is the productivity gap – we lag the Germans and American by 30% in what is produced by the average worker.
That's what happens when you go down the mass immigration route to growing the economy.
I don't really understand what those who resort directly to personal abuse believe they are achieving other than personal satisfaction in "winning".
It tends to alienate anyone who isn't already well and truly on the same "side" and some who are may feel uncomfortable about being so.
I think SeanT has got the right idea with taking a break from politics and PB.
BTW we Rees-Moggians are going to be needing the "Jacobite" brand, I'm afraid. I hope you've finished with it.
But Australia, Canada and New Zealand are all commodity economies. We cannot be like them, because we don't have the resources.
For Roger in his South of France chateau, or Tyson in his Tuscan villa, there certainly won't be.
For us in the UK there will be.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/UK-Is-Europes-Last-Hope-For-A-Fracking-Success.html
That three word dismissal, magic money tree, ignores the fact that money being a token, there is absolutely a money tree. It is just not magic, using it has consequences, some beneficial, some not so and it is true you cannot create value just by creating money..
Using money supply was fairly standard government economics in increasingly prosperous Western nations for decades. There is no automatic reason for any country using it judiciously to become Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany or Venezuela. (Whether Corbyn would be judicious, I leave to one side).
Another Tory impoverishment of the debate to suggest monetarism, though orthodox now, is somehow the only possible economics. It's nonsense, but the public - whose own money is inelastic - don't get that.
Unlike Switzerland
The problem is that, while we have a lot of natural gas, its not economic unless the price is above able $8/mmcf, against about half that today.
Come the next commodity boom, we'll probably make good money from it. But given that North Sea oil is in permanent decline, all it will likely do is ameliorate that.
So the government got money out of nothing which it can spend. So, what's the difference ?
One in seven German cars are exported to the UK.
Bless...
But once again there is a problem with Corbyn, with his economic illiteracy and with his tendency to strike immature postures divorced from economics.
Is prime minister Corbyn going to say to the trade unions and to the public sector "whatever you demand, we will give you? 10% 20%? More?
If Corbyn ever becomes PM -and the same received wisdom that said that Theresa May would win a landslide, now tells us that he will -how embarrassing it will be for him when eventually and inevitably he has to say to the trade unions: No.
The letters page to 'Jackie' is more intelligent and that's for 12 year olds. 300 odd messages from morons. Real morons!
Is it possible these people have jobs? I don't think I've ever met two such imbeciles let alone 300! Could they be renegades from here? Anyone want to confess?
The commitment to buy back remains, but here the government sold it twice.
The people votes 60 - 40 to stay in [ who cares 50.1 would do ]. We revoke Art.50.
As Tusk and many others have said, there are only two form of Brexits:
Brexit or No Brexit.
Don's public sector pay rise money go round prompted me. Monetarism increasingly fails to distribute wealth in an optimal way that balances reward for effort and basic decency fairly at all levels. One could say previous more Keynesian times, notwithstanding all their problems, did a better job at this.
I would like to see debate at least reopened on whether inflation control should be the only lever in economic policy,, whether the absolutely nonsense detail how this £7bn of tax rise exactly covers this £7bn of proposed spending is at all helpful when margins of error on deficits dwarf these numbers, whether the narrow focus on government finance is helpful given so much debt in the wider economy, whether more traditional Keynesian options have a role to play. Even, from a more right wing perspective, the timing of cycles of adding (hopefully good) regulation / stripping out bad regulation could be used explicitally as an economic lever.
Shutting the whole discussion down by singing - magic money tree, la, la, la - may be politically useful, but it does the overall discussion a disservice. Again.
The main thing I think that should be scrapped is national pay agreements. I live in the South West and I do think that professional public sector workers are underpaid. I think that this is probably the case over all the South of England, and as such it makes it difficult for those people to compete when buying houses etc. House prices are probably 2 - 3 times as much, and that does lead to significant problems.
Buying the bonds exchanges illiquid assets for liquid assets, and the sellers can now use some or all of that to spend on real goods and services - consumption or investment, which supports overall spending. That is the idea behind QE. But of course a large part will be spent on other assets including property, driving asset prices generally upwards. When the QE is unwound the reverse happens, and overall spending falls and asset prices are pushed down (and interest rates up). As far as the government’s balance sheet is concerned all that has happened is that it has exchanged short-term debt for long-term debt, then reversed the process to where it started.
But if as you suggest the government sold the bonds it had acquired and used the proceeds to pay for current spending, it would indeed be in effect printing money to finance itself in a roundabout way. So it must take that money out of circulation in order not to start up such an inflationary process.
35 mins http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08x4rf7
However, the point is that Parliament has passed legislation to invoke Article 50. Brexit is now the default position. Parliament has to expressly pass a bill to revoke Article 50, and I don't see where the numbers are for that.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-mays-offer-to-eu-citizens-living-in-uk-falls-far-short-a3583771.html
Mr. Calum, well, that's not terrific for the blues.
I believe Corbyn's a leaver at heart, but he'd rather be PM in the EU than LOTO out. If he sees the opportunity to defeat the government and force an election some time within the next two years, he will. The Tories are in disarray, May is discredited and the momentum (ho-hum) is all on Labour's side.
Corbyn wants power. It's within his grasp. If all he has to do is perform an expedient volte-face, why wouldn't he?
We did this in the 70's. If we had not been lucky with the windfall of North Sea oil our economy would have been more like Venezuela than Greece. We will not be that lucky again.
The idea that this demonstrates economic competence on the part of Labour really beggars belief.
There was a stunned silence, followed by snorts of suppressed laughter.
General industry pay increases should be for improved productivity performance, a combination of quality and quantity.
The internet provides one of the main opportunities for improving productivity at present.
There were snorts of suppressed laughter in the Sky commentary box on Saturday when Ben Stokes took a great catch and Mikey Holding pronounced it "End of de Kock".
https://twitter.com/englandcricket/status/883655266738200576
It was all about who was going to be the next leader of the Tory Party.
Now that the dust is starting to settle, it is clear that Mrs May doesn`t have a clue, and is even looking to Jeremy Corbyn to come to her rescue.
The long-term future of the country and its inhabitants is far more important than that. Time that May and Corbyn stopped messing about.
You can kind-of-sort-of get free lunches, but the bill comes back to you sooner or later. Of course if you're Corbyn's age, the later isn't so much of a concern.
I'm old enough to remember it being used with some frequency back in the late 60s/early 70s (and thought it offensive back then) - which is not to excuse her in the slightest.
It reminds me of when we went to see the Black and White Minstrels in the early 70s in Southampton. Even at the age of 12 I thought WTF ( or I would have done if we used such language then, the F word was a lot rarer). For someone in public life using a phrase like that today is almost beyond belief.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/2273176/David-Cameron-urged-to-sack-Tory-peer-after-nigger-in-the-woodpile-remark.html
2008, Cameron faced a similar problem over 'that' phrase. The wiki entry is quite funny...use usually ends with a profound apology.
It is all going to fall in black morass and there'll be a transition and then a change of heart.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/mitterrand-and-heath-add-to-majors-woes-pms-views-on-single-currency-challenged-embarrassing-1487349.html
That ugly phrase and some other potty-mouthed remarks seem very unworthy of Gentleman John. I feel sad and betrayed. But perhaps politics is like the army, where foul language is part of the culture and you have to use it to fit in.
As for this MP, what point was she even trying to make?
I got the impression at the time that many of those voting thought it would be possible to engineer a 'soft' Brexit. Had they been able to (or had the sense to) see forward a few months, the majority might well have been a lot smaller.
As it is, a referendum followed by so resounding a confirmation makes a U-turn well nigh impossible to contemplate.
A second referendum might do it, but other than Vince Cable, who is going to argue for that ? Certainly not the leaders of the two largest parties.
If you believe that, you can get 15 for either driver on Ladbrokes. However, bear in mind Verstappen's had something daft like 5 DNFs in the last 7 races. Ricciardo is on his best ever podium run currently. (Betfair odds are 16 for Verstappen, 19.5 for Ricciardo).
I think it's worth looking at, but at the moment I'm erring on the side of caution. I'd also suggest consulting a forecast. If it's wet, that's great for Verstappen and Ricciardo.
Edited extra bit: current forecast is dry, but it's some way off yet.
Just wanted to say three things:-
1. Best wishes to @RichardTyndall and @OldKingCole over their health issues. I hope they get resolved speedily and in the best possible way.
2. Ken Clarke provided a really good account the other day on Newsnight about how the government should handle the pay cap issue. A great pity there are not more people of his quality at the top of politics at present.
3. I increasingly wonder whether Brexit will happen. The government seems utterly clueless. So does the Opposition. There seems to be no good or even broadly sensible outcome. What I don't know is how we avoid a car crash while not trashing the people's belief in democracy by ignoring their vote. I wish I did.
It is very odd that Remainers keep kidding themselves that overturning a democratic decision becaue the elite don't like it is popular. Even without the referendum result, Labour and the Conservatives were both supported by pro-EU leaders at the 2015 election. They got 67% of the vote between them. At the 2017 election, they were both supported by pro-Brexit leaders who had backed leaving the single market. They got 82% of the vote between them.
I agree both sides are clueless.
Mr. B, likewise, but the pace of Ricciardo in Austria, pretty much on a par with Mercedes and Ferrari, was very surprising.
A bandwagon under the pretence of concern is trying to roll.